The wrangling over what standards should be, how they should be determined and evaluated, and who should be responsible for them has dominated recent debates about reforming America's public schools. Yet the constant litany about “standards” is confusing. As Walter Lippmann observed, the frequent repetition of a word or term tends to diminish the sense of its syllables, and the word loses the meaning it once held. So, when we speak of this topic, our first question is, “What do we actually mean when we talk about standards?”
Let us here refer to standards as “images of excellence,” examples of what we consider “good enough” in a particular set of circumstances. Of course, any notion of what is “good enough” implies a set of criteria used to judge worthiness, and here is the rub. When schooling is so dependent on context and on the shifting realities of particular students, teachers, parents, and communities, how can we define a set of criteria to be uniformly applied that will meaningfully place children and schools somewhere on a spectrum between “not good” and “good enough”?
We do need to ratchet up standards, but we first need to answer the confounding question of how to raise them in an effective way that respects the democratic traditions of this nation.
Who Decides?
Many believe that schools themselves are incapable of creating and maintaining the high-quality academic standards required by the emerging global economy and culture. Their distrust suggests that standards would better be delivered by some “objective” group of seemingly representative, expert committees.
Unfortunately, this logic glosses over what should be burning central issues. What right does the state have to decide what values my child should learn? The state might persuade me that it can set standards for computational mathematics, reading, or expository prose. But can it fairly decide the meaning of history or the aesthetic basis of any of the arts? Shouldn't parents have direct and immediate influence over these sorts of decisions? And if so, does that mean the community, represented by the state, has no place in shaping its culture through the schools?
All of us want resourceful, scholarly, and imaginative teachers for our children. Yet top people will come into teaching only if their jobs entrust them with important responsibility. If the substance and standards of the curriculum are essentially removed from teachers' grasp, or if standardization channels and corrupts their work, who of high quality will be attracted to the profession? Alternatively, if there is no standard, won't chaos reign?
Inevitably, the schools are accountable to all of us. The system of standard building, standard-setting, and standard-based assessing has to allow many voices. However, including the perspectives of many while still setting relevant standards is a delicate balancing act. It requires an ecosystem small enough to be responsive to the divergent beliefs and values of the immediate constituency and mechanisms to connect people along shared values. Achieving a balance depends on our ability to honor the individual school as the proper locus of accountability while also acknowledging that the school cannot manage this responsibility in isolation. Let's look at an example of how high standards might be set in a way that serves both individual liberty and civic virtue.
Exhibitions
We'll start where reform must be rooted—in the classroom. Imagine a 7th grade class where two teams of students are conducting a “trial” before the United States Supreme Court: the 1944 Korematsu case. They have filed “briefs,” and the sequential drafts of these briefs, including each student's contributions over the month prior to the debate, have been made available to the “jury.” One side challenges the Roosevelt Executive Order requiring internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the other defends it. The jury includes the teacher, the principal of the middle school, a teacher from a neighboring school, and two parents. Six 5th graders watch, seeing what lies ahead of them in their studies. The debate see-saws, with each side marshalling new facts and probing the other's inconsistencies. At the end, the jury members ask some questions that push the students' grasp of the issues. Though the trial itself is in an individual teacher's classroom, its context is much wider: the whole school knows about it and the standards set for these 7th graders will affect all students.
This trial is a public exhibition of mastery. Because it draws on various modes of expression, the performance offers a glimpse of a rich cross section of a child's skills and abilities. Through the interchange among participants, we can see each child's progress, and make a fairer, more useful assessment of the students' abilities than traditional assessment would allow. If parents do not like the substance or standards of the exhibitions they see, they can withdraw their children to search out a truer articulation of their values.
Local Control
This kind of local exhibition pays homage to the uniquely American (and Jeffersonian) idea of individual liberty, placing faith in the schools and communities to come up with worthy educational goals. The exhibitions reflect their local constituencies and the regional variances and cultural diversity there.
Exhibitions begin with the determination of what students should know and be able to do and proceed methodically backward to define what and how students must be taught to reach those outcomes. These aims are made clear in advance to drive and shape instruction. Though standards are rigorous, they are flexible enough to accommodate the art of teaching.
Yet we know that if we trust standard-setting to local schools, achievement will vary wildly. It is for this reason that we must have ways to connect schools so the public is aware of the definitions of quality.
The actual performance provides a public opportunity to encourage the redefinition of standards. Public awareness presumes broad access to the best exhibitions, and we should also presume there will be some system of feedback. Modern computers and televideo technology are two promising ways to bring a wide array of exemplary student work into every school and every public library. In fact, we may soon have the means to display complex images of excellence in student performance, and to engage in a large-scale conversation about them. Standards from local exhibitions could also promote a national dialogue about the heart of education.
These sorts of connections are, in part, an answer to the kinds of uneven standards that will develop in isolation. We recommend the following policy options, which would work to strengthen and complement schools' use of exhibitions:
The best tests in computational mathematics, reading, and expository prose should continue to supplement exhibitions. These scores will establish benchmarks over time in basic skill areas and provide a check on the results of the richer accountability mechanisms.
Students' work should be maintained over time in portfolios or files. The work should be kept at school and should be open to the students, teachers, families, and chosen representatives of the district and state. For their part, the district or state governments should audit these individual portfolios and measure the aggregate results of their examination, drawing conclusions, for example, by viewing the work of every 15th student against a general standard agreed upon by the state and the school. The general state standard might be hammered out through discussions of what high-standard work for students of roughly similar age across the country should and does look like. This should be complemented with the periodic reports of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Finally, schools should publish and publicly defend an annual report, which would include the state examiner's statement. The report should be widely available and should provide access to the NAEP norms as well as examples of high-standard student work drawn from a national pool.
In our ideal world then, the individual school takes the initiative in setting standards, and the process is powerfully affected by parents, those who critique student work on a national basis, and by state officials. Each group's rights are represented directly and not, as is often the case now, through token representation on centrally controlled committees. Our vision of this public forum is full of tension, as these constituencies play out their rights, but we believe such tension is the only protection for democracy itself.
