Why Standards Must Die

It has been 30 years since Marc S.Tucker published the New Standards Carnegie report, and launched a series of subsidiary institutions to promote and move forward Standards as the basis for all global schooling and teacher credentialing.  

Through several iterations from his initial 23 States Standards consortium, to assorted bragging rights for states as to which had the most rigorous Standards, to the more recent Common Core which peaked with 46 states’ adoption only to fragment, Standards has come to rule the policy models for every aspect of education.

Even beyond academic Standards, the movement seems poised now to invade the domains of psychological development and emotional health to establish required performance goals for children's social and inner lives, with yet another iteration of Standards as competency based computer programs for more specific standards alignment; making Standards a concept that rules all aspects of children's lives.

At it’s simplest, Standards has been the word used to describe the list of things children must learn and be able to do by the end of each school year; the list of things purportedly planned to be on the standardized test at the end of the year; and the items which teachers must show their students can respond to as prescribed on the standardized tests, or both be deemed insufficient.  

Through hundreds of billions of dollars of high pressure public relations from assorted billionaire venture philanthropists who worked in collaboration with policy support, corollary funding, and Hunger Games style state competitions from the USDOE-- and through the legislative support nationwide of both ALEC and DFER, Standards have become the equivalent of the Holy Scripture of Education, both literally interpreted, and independent of day to day reality in its proclaimed miracles.

Yet, today, in spite of all the billions of dollars, the best efforts of capitalist investors’ campaigns, and massive support from both PR companies and Media outlets in print and video; Standards have become perhaps the worst failure of the last century in a century of many failed education initiatives du jour.

How could that be? Standards, and their implementation were to be the saviors of America’s “failing” education system.  They were to create the shambala of societies and an entire culture filled with former student-bodhisattvas, so perfect that rather than taking their place among the gods, they would all just be sticking around to help others attain superiority. Standards would make a generation of perfect entrepreneurs, innovators, and winners in the world economic domination contest, who also didn’t mind being on time for rote jobs in an essentially service driven economy which called for long work hours with limited breaks and low salaries.

But here we are 30 years later. Test scores are flat or falling. Field trips, electives, and projects have been abandoned for testing, and the money once spent on schools now goes to data collection on the Standards. Our youth are facing unprecedented physical and mental health and stress issues. Quality teachers are flooding from the field, and our city schools have been deconstructed.

Though Common Core still survives in various wigs and costumes and continues to be the hope of the current generation of Edu-sperts (who are now busy training teachers how to align and create perfectly matched and standardized gradebooks to match their perfectly standardized curricula), The Common Core, indeed all of this generation of Standards, have been a disaster of near Biblical proportions; a blight visited on the people from above leaving them aghast and beaten.

Parents, students, teachers, and even in-school administrators are miserable in the school world that Standards has created. The joy of learning, the excitement of discovery, the invigoration of deep and higher level inquiry and endeavor, the broad creative curriculum, and the dynamic learning communities have all been stripped from our schools and classrooms.

Differentiation for individual students, though given lip service, has been essentially driven from PreK-12 Education in favor of uniformity and replaced with teaching to the test; a test set to at least one to two years above the known developmental spans of children’s ages; tests which neither the parents nor teachers are allowed to see or use as means of future instruction design or support for their children, and whose private student data is expensive shelfware only trotted out when a political opportunist wants a handy campaign or re-development opportunity, or districts want to trim budgets by firing teachers.

But beyond the poor implementation, the lack of understanding of children, and the total absence of connection to actual learning processes, there is an even deeper and more fatal problem with Standards, and that unconscious tragic flaw is an even more compelling reason Standards as the raison d’etre must go.

As the International Futures Forum puts it:

“The scale of global interconnectivity and interdependence has resulted in a steep change in the complexity, uncertainty and speed of change in today’s operating environment. Many of the concepts we used to rely on to make sense of our world no longer have traction. In many respects we are experiencing a ‘conceptual emergency’.” Or as Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod so aptly put it in their Shift Happens slideshow: “We are living in Exponential times….We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist, using technologies that don’t exist, to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet…. The amount of technological information is doubling every 2 years.”  That means information students learn in year one of a four year program is outdated by year three. Or, put differently,  as Wikipedia tells us: “Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990,” ---- 3 to 4 years AFTER Marc S. Tucker laid out the Standards movement.

Standards’ biggest problem, beyond their complete failure, is that they are a dated paradigm-- too rigid, too stagnant, and too cumbersome to be an effective model for the speed of change and the level of complexity in ours and our students’ lives.

That is the deeper reason it is well past time for all the Standards to go.

And before you panic, there are lots of other ways we have and can choose to provide high quality curriculum and produce high quality outcomes for our children. They just can't be attached to a term that is punitive in perspective and a concept that has not worked in the past and cannot work in the future.

The Dream

I have a fantasy about what our schools might be like.

In my world, each town or neighborhood might have a central campus which has at its center a large, beautiful completely equipped and technologically up to date Library.  This library can serve as both the main public library and the schools’  library. It has both traditional reading and storytelling spaces and up to date technology resources, but also houses community meeting rooms, including some that can serve for town meetings and committee meetings. It is architecturally beautiful and distinctive. Outside it are gardens and seating for those who enjoy the outdoors.

Around this Library on a spacious and beautiful campus is a set of public schools, playgrounds, playing fields, and park-picnic grounds.  The schools are divided K-3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10-12; each level with their own building and age level outdoor facilities surrounding it.  There are art studios, labs, an auditorium-theatre, performance, and maker spaces for each level of student needs, including a general outdoor amphitheatre.  

The entire campus is circled by an avenue which houses shops and services, such as doctors and dentists, pre-school child care, cafes and other vendors the families of the community need in connection with the life the campus represents.

Off shooting from the Main avenue nearest the 10-12 School is a community college at which 10th-12th level students can split their time between High School and College courses in a configuration which fits their strengths best. Indeed, each campus from K through 12 is configured to enable students to reach up on a course by course basis without abandoning their common-age friends or feeling limited by the inability to move forward.  The various schools are connected, not only by bike and walking paths, but by a trolley or shuttle system which enables intergrade level activities and provides students with the chance to vary their course levels as needed.

Courses at these schools are based  either on trimester or quarterly credits so that students are never trapped spending a year on a course that they have to repeat, and they will have a mix and match combination of quarterly units that can be consolidated into a full year credit, providing maximum flexibility for course choice.

This campus represents the heart and soul of the community.  Here is where holiday festivities can be celebrated, conversations about how to conduct the business of the community can be had, and settled.

This Library and these Schools belong to everyone, and here all the community are welcome to participate in the life of the neighborhood or town.

This is but one possible dream for our communities, but one for all of them from the poorest to the richest.

True Believer

Learning, Imagination, and Empathy

I have to admit that I come to this piece as a true believer.  I believe fervently in 3 things which to me are the trinity of a healthy world and life. In my life, the greatest pleasures and senses of communion and achievement have come from these three intertwined values.

I believe in Learning, in the power of continued discovery and curiosity.  The power of humans’ desire to learn was and is the driving characteristic behind our successes as a species, and as  individuals. The continuing desire to learn is the one thing that keeps life interesting, exciting,  and vibrant.  Even if we do not have the usual measures of wealth and success, if we continue to learn and want to understand more, our lives can be deeply meaningful. Discovery leads us to walk and talk and explore our environments, to learn to read and write, and to find new ideas. I have complained in the past that my mother introduces me, even at my deepening age, as her daughter, the perpetual student.  But in reality, I am secretly pleased that she recognizes, no matter how old I am, or how much I have studied, I continue to believe with devotion in the power and positive impact of learning.  

I believe in Imagination.  Daydreams and imagining all manner of inventions, creations, and stories was my greatest pastime during childhood, and it has followed me through the rest of my life.  I have often known that my reputation as a dreamer, and imagineer has been seen as too much, as irrational fantasy, but it is integral to who I am and will remain so I suspect. Imagination is the foundation of creation and design that enables us to make the world in a more palatable image than came before.  Imagination is what leads us to new horizons, and positive change.

I believe in Empathy and empathy’s resulting action-- Kindness.  Without empathy our lives would be harsh indeed, and much as I love Learning and Imagination as lifelong endeavors, they would be shallow without the caring connections empathy creates.  By being able to put ourselves in others’ experiences and conditions, we are able to care, love, and find psychological and spiritual wholeness.  As Learning anchors us to the world, and imagination projects us into the possible, empathy threads us to one another.  

These three provide an ever spiraling center for me as a teacher and a person.  I may not always be fully empowered in all three, but they remain the touchstones to which I return over and over, even when tired, even when broke, even when rushed, even when bereft-- these can refresh and sustain me, and I believe they also sustain and refresh the lives of others and our communities.

Through communal learning, imagining, and person to person understanding, we have great power as human beings, great potential, great possibility.  And those three values are ones on which we can base the next iteration of our schools.