“Forty-six states and the District of Columbia today will announce an effort to craft a single vision for what children should learn each year from kindergarten through high school graduation, an unprecedented step toward a uniform definition of success in American schools,” as reported in the Post.

A tad bit more of the article…

“The push for common reading and math standards marks a turning point in a movement to judge U.S. children using one yardstick that reflects expectations set for students in countries around the world at a time of global competition. Today, each state decides what to teach in third-grade reading, fifth-grade math and every other class. Critics think some set a bar so that students can pass tests but, ultimately, are ill-prepared.”

Yes and no.

While “critics” – whom are never cited, quoted, nor named – may levy this commentary, the issues against complete national, soon-to-become compulsory, standards is much, much deeper.

1. Standards have existed in US education since the Eisenhower era.  They barely worked then, just as much as they barely work now.

2. They have been “redressed” many times.  From LBJ’s “Great Society”, Reagan’s “A National at Risk”, Clinton’s “Goals 2000: Educate America”, Bush’s “No Child Left Behind”, to whatever Obama will initiate, to this push… all are built upon the same faulty philosophic framework.*

– The Philosophic framework being that children, if provided exactly the same in-school conditions can achieve the same level of educational prowess.  The assumptions in this concept are many, but primarily it is worth noting that children are unstandardized, come from unstandardized families, and are all unique – built to excel in those things they delight in and to gradually, or quickly, gravitate away from those academic areas they do not.

3. Children are unstandardized (as noted above).  Attempting to “ensure” that a standardized level of “X” will be acheived by an unstandardized population is such an industrialized concept of education, grounded in modernity, that it is absurd.  Children come to school with learning difficulties, from broken homes, they’ve been abused, raised with varying levels of commitment, etc.  Unless someone wants to guarantee that the entry population is standardized a standardized exiting population is absurd to plan for.

4. Whose standards?  Educators, Legislators, etc. talk of “standards”, but are they the educational standards needed to succeed in urban environments or those for suburban students?  Do the skill sets transfer?  While we can agree on a need for standards, the talk of it being a voluntary commitment by states will fade as the “universal” standards remain unmet by UN-universal, “Unstandard”, unique school districts.

5. Once a state subscribes to the standards and thus mandates its districts to follow said standards, the concern of this “critic” is that this will only further limit the capacity of the local school to adjust to the needs of localized circumstances and individual learning situations.  While we can say this happens currently under standards, can we still assert this when the situation has become less flexible?

In conclusion, what ever happened to liberty?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 1:28 am and is filed under Education, Futures, Policy, Student-Centric, standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.