"Kids get the standards thing," Pat Wasley, dean of the college of education at the University of Washington, assured her audience. "Kids feel that it's a really positive and productive thing for the community to have high standards for them."
Students in all age groups, from all parts of the United States, agree on this point. "When we ask them, 'What do you think should be the expectations for you?' " Wasley reports, "kids always say they should be really high." The students say: We want to get jobs, we want to go to college—and if adults don't care about how good we are, then we won't get in.
But there is a caveat, Wasley noted. Students "really want to be successful in achieving the standards. The standards are a very good thing from kids' perspective when they feel that their school, their teachers, their principals and community members are going to make sure that they can meet the standards. It's when the standards feel punishing to kids that they really have problems with them."
Students' universal support for standards surprised Wasley, she admitted. "When I started asking kids questions about the standards movement, I expected that they would be more critical of it, saying, 'Ah, we learned how to do all that stuff; we don't need these standards.' "
But, in fact, students do want standards, she found. "They want to be sure that we are pushing them to a level of performance that will skill them up for their lives. They want to be competent people."
That's not all students want, however. "They want the work that they do in schools to be meaningful; that's really important to them," Wasley said. "And they want the feedback that they get to help them grow. Right now, in the midst of the standards work, they get very little feedback about their performance."
Students also want the outcome of their work to be a significant accomplishment. "That's when kids come alive and feel as if they can make a contribution," Wasley said. "So the standards work needs to allow them to see how they're growing and developing, and what kind of contribution they might make to our world." Under those conditions, students can develop "a wholehearted enthusiasm for the work that they're undertaking and for the growth that they're demonstrating," she said.
"We have to make sure that the standards allow us to build kids' dreams—to give them the kind of competence and confidence that they need," Wasley urged in closing. "We need them to feel wildly enthusiastic about school. And the minute the standards stop doing that, all of us need to speak up to make sure that doesn't happen."