Why Standards?
November 3, 2019
If you ask colleagues why we have academic content and performance standards today, they are likely to reply with a curse aimed in the general direction of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. But there is a bit of history before the 21st century, and it is important to bear this history in mind when considering the advantages and disadvantages of standards.
The Fundamental Flaws of Standards
It's easy to criticize standards, whether established by the states, provinces, national governments, or collaboratives, such as the Common Core State Standards. They all suffer from the assumption that students need one year of learning, and that teachers of sixth grade, for example, need only teach the sixth-grade standards and then a miracle happens. But every school I visit has students – often a majority of them – who need more than one year of learning. That leaves the sixth-grade math teacher dutifully teaching exponents to students who can't multiply and ratios to students who don't understand fractions. Although some newer versions of standards, such as the Common Core, promised to be "fewer and focused," the reality for the vast majority of classroom teachers is that there is too much curriculum and not enough time to teach it.
Despite Their Flaws, Standards Remain Essential
I wrote "If You Hate Standards, Learn to Love the Love the Bell Curve" in June of 2001 at the dawn of No Child Left Behind. Only a handful of states had academic content standards, and the new law required every state to adopt academic standards and create tests for them. Testing companies responded with enthusiasm; state and district political leaders less so. There were the inevitable arguments about local control, and that federal bureaucrats had no business telling people in other parts of their country what their children should learn. This resistance particularly played out in discussions of science, where the debate over the validity of natural selection continued to play out in state and local school board elections. Similarly, social studies standards became the focal point of debate as standards presented starkly different views about the value of criticizing and celebrating American and Western civilization. Even in writing and math, there were stark differences among the states, with some cleaving to whole language, others emphasizing phonics, and others claiming to embrace balanced literacy. Even with the new federal law, students could cross the border from one state to another and confront starkly different approaches to the most basic building blocks of learning.
But missing from the debate, both in 2001 and now as we head into the third decade of the 21st century, are two fundamental questions. First, why are standards the best way to guide curriculum and assess student learning? Second, if standards were abandoned, what is the alternative? When educational leaders get too deep into the weeds of how to implement standards without first identifying the "why" of standards, they can create endless paperwork drills by teachers, accompanied by the inevitable resentment that working without a clear purpose engenders.
The first question: Why standards? There are only two options to evaluate student learning: comparing student performance to that of other students, or comparing student learning to an objective standard. The first approach, exemplified by the normal distribution or bell curve, is the worst of all possible worlds. It praises the work of non-proficient students, as long as they beat other, even less proficient students. To be a success in the world of the bell curve, you don't need to be proficient; you just need to be above the average. We would never evaluate teenage drivers, airline pilots, or brain surgeons this way. "I didn't have as many crashes as those other kids!" is not how students get their driver's licenses. They must achieve a standard of proficiency, even if they take the test many times, or they don't get their license. Just as bad, the bell curve invalidates the performance of students who are proficient, but are slower than others in test-taking (or not economically able to purchase an expert recommendation for more time on tests), or otherwise perform below the average. Finally, this approach puts students in the position of attempting to play a game when the rules are always changing. Students and teachers never know in advance what they need to do in order to be proficient – they are jousting at ghosts that change from one year to the next. Incredibly, even states that claim to have "standards-based" assessments behave as if they are still in the 20th-century world of the bell curve every time they change the scores required for proficiency after the students have taken the test. Whatever the flaws of standards, evaluating students against a standard is more fair, consistent, and motivating than evaluating them on the bell curve.
The second question requires us to consider the alternative to standards. While standards may be too numerous and unfocused now, the alternative in the pre-standards era was a chaotic view of "local control" in which the "local" referred not to the state, or even the district, but the individual classroom. As students moved from one school to another, one community to another, or even one classroom to another, they faced wildly inconsistent curricula and assessments. This institutionalized idiosyncrasy gave enormous advantages to students whose families were economically and geographically stable, and punished students who, for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of teaching and learning, moved frequently. In this context, the good old days were not so good – just old.
Reframing the Debate
Rather than cursing standards and yearning for the enlightened days of the 20th century (and, for that matter, the 18th century), a better use of our rhetorical energy would be making standards better. For example, states and other creators of standards might reconsider the siloed approach that approaches every academic discipline differently, and help teachers in all grades and disciplines find common ground. There are glimmers of this collaboration, for example, in the cross-disciplinary approach to require students to support a claim with evidence and reasoning in science, social studies, mathematics, and English. Real collaboration would help us use the same language to convey the same concept, and identify these over-arching themes. These are what I have called "power standards," that subset of standards that have the greatest impact on student learning. We can certainly debate which standards deserve this label and are most important, but every teacher knows that the answer to the question, “Which standards are most important?" is not "all of them."
If we wish to move beyond the current flaws of standards, then we must not return to the bell curve, but rather improve the clarity and focus of standards. We can reject the approach that leads to 600-page textbooks and their digital equivalents, burying teachers under mounds of learning objectives that focus on delivery rather than learning.