Standardized Incoherence
[Doug Noon has been teaching in Fairbanks, Alaska since 1983. He teaches sixth-grade at Denali Elementary School, and holds a M.Ed. with a focus in language and literacy. He lives with his wife and family outside of Fairbanks. He blogs at Borderland. Welcome aboard, Doug. - Eds.]
The Obama administration's education agenda tells us that "America faces few more urgent challenges than preparing our children to compete in a global economy." Business elites chime in. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and he had some advice for Barack Obama: “Go after the teacher unions.” The media picks it up, and it's stuck on reverb, repeating endless hollow variations on the themes of accountability, incentives, and choice.
When the big talk trickles down to the classroom, it's still only talk. I watch my sixth-graders as they spend time each week working with their kindergarten buddies - an arrangement in which we make time for the older and younger kids to get together. They count and read, play games, build things, or do craft projects - whatever needs doing that day. The kindergarten teacher wonders sometimes why so many kids start school as eager young explorers, and then gradually disengage as they move through the grades, either dropping out or learning to just get by.
The policy people and the business gurus tell us they have the answer. Everyone knows we need standards. So now we have content standards, performance standards, professional standards, proficiency standards, and even standards for parent involvement. We measure annual progress with standardized assessments. And to make sure we take them seriously, there are consequences. Management is measurement.
The economic argument for public education, with it's attendant call for increases in math and science expertise, has been with us since Sputnik - most of my life. Yet there is nothing "new" or progressive in any of it, other than the 21st Century prefix. Alfie Kohn takes a poke at the competitiveness agenda by asking why we should stop at mere 21st century skills:
Essentially, we can take whatever objectives or teaching strategies we happen to favor and, merely by attaching a label that designates a future time period, endow them (and ourselves) with an aura of novelty and significance. Better yet, we instantly define our critics as impediments to progress. If this trick works for the adjective “21st-century,” imagine the payoff from ratcheting it up by a hundred years.
Kohn says that "Education is first and foremost about being first and foremost. Therefore, we might as well trump the 21st-century folks by peering even further into the future."
Since rank has its privilege, the privileged still want to do the ranking. And so the geniuses who plunged the world into financial turmoil are using the crisis to sell people on the idea that teachers and unions are the problem. Why anyone would buy any of that is beyond me.
The 21st century education discourse is mired in contradictions. The standards movement is a backward push toward worn out conventions and basic skills, while the soaring rhetoric about global competitiveness calls for out of the box thinking. Teaching to the test constrains curriculum, while kids come to school needing and wanting to understand a world that is rapidly being wired for instant access. We need excellence and creativity, but we're willing to settle for minimum competency and compliance. The standards we lack are standards of coherence - standards to ensure that education is, above and beyond everything else, meaningful. How can any project succeed without the support of its beneficiaries?
The problem here is not one of will, or governance. The problem is curriculum, the technology around which our ideas about school and knowledge itself is organized. Until we recognize that the problem schools face is not technical or organizational, but conceptual, it will not change. If we want things to be different, we have to do things differently. It's time to start thinking big.
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