Johnny, Jamal, and Juan do not learn to read and write very well, no matter where they live in this country. National and international tests continue to give our students poor marks.
One major reason for this poor showing is that we lack uniform, and uniformly high, standards for all our students. That is why the federal government began to encourage the development of national standards almost a decade ago.
Many legislators and educators cooled off to national standards after the angry battle over the national history standards came to a draw. They decided we would be better off with standards developed by each state. They were even more convinced that state standards were the way to go after the Clinton Administration defunded the two professional organizations charged with creating national “content standards” in the English language arts on the grounds that their “standards” lacked content and didn’t address any of the substantive issues they were expected to address.
But Johnny, Jamal, and Juan will still not learn to read and write well if state standards are also devoid of content, uninterpretable, and unmeasurable. And many state departments of education are trying to make sure their standards are precisely that. In response to evaluation reports just released by the American Federation of Teachers and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, public officials in two states criticized for their vapid English language arts and reading standards do not deny their standards are vague and unmeasurable. Indeed, they proudly claim their standards were intended to be vague and unmeasurable.
Clearly, New Jersey citizens will find it difficult to interpret such “standards” as “identify common aspects of human existence,” or “use oral communication to influence the behavior of others.” Nor will it be easy to measure (even if one wanted to) such “standards” as “write from experiences, thoughts, and feelings,” “write on self- selected topics,” “use writing to extend experience,” or “understand that written communication can affect the behavior of others.” Those examples also come from New Jersey’s document.
New Jersey’s assistant commissioner of education is quoted as saying to a reporter from the Asbury Park Press, “When they (the AFT and Fordham reports) accuse our standards of lacking specificity and measurability, we say, `That’s right, we know that. They lack specificity because they weren’t designed to be specific. We are a local control state.'”
Similarly, Michigan’s citizens are going to have to live with (and figure out the meaning of) such “benchmarks” as “evaluate the power of using multiple voices” or “analyze how cultures interact with one another in literature and other texts, and describe the consequences of the interaction as it relates to our common heritage.” A consultant to the Michigan Department of Education’s standards is quoted as telling a reporter for the Detroit News that their standards were meant to be a “broader mission statement.” Indeed, local schools would have had a hard time, she asserted, trying to turn “detailed standards” into curriculum. “There won’t be any changes in those standards,” she emphasized. “They are here to stay.”
Because New Jersey and Michigan, like most states, are planning statewide assessments based on their standards, waving the banner of local control to justify vague standards is quite hypocritical. Control will still be exerted at the state level by the assessments, whether or not a state’s standards are vague. Everyone knows that state assessments are the tail that will eventually wag the curricular dog. They will do so by means of the kind of reading passages they contain, the kind of language they use, the kind of knowledge they expect of students, and the level of difficulty they embody.
Deliberately vague standards are in essence a facade behind which public officials can create tests so ideologically mischievous that they lead to problematic local curricula or so academically undemanding that they are as ineffective as the older and discredited minimum competency tests were. A New Jersey education professor who had helped to write its English language arts standards candidly acknowledged, “students in Newark shouldn’t be expected to deal with the same assignments as those in Holmdel Township.” Public officials smitten by either ideological passions or egalitarian sympathies can hide behind vague standards because there is usually no further accountability to the public built into the process.
Tests have to be secure documents. As a consequence, the only people who will know how a department of education and its test makers have interpreted a state’s standards are the teachers who give the tests and the students who take them. Except for a few sample questions, all the public will be able to see are the vague statements in the state’s standards’ document. Expressions of respect for local control are thus little more than a red herring—a way to placate conservative sensibilities while conveniently keeping the public in the dark about what the state’s academic expectations actually are.
State standards are supposed to make sure that expectations for all students in the state are similar: high and academic in content or thrust. They are also intended to help rebuild confidence in the public schools. Fortunately, some states have created reasonably strong standards—standards that are reasonably clear, specific, measurable, comprehensive, and demanding. For instance, to show the kind of growth it wants over the grades in understanding informational material, New York offers the following “performance indicators” (among others):
By the end of grade four, students should be able to “select information appropriate to the purpose of their investigation and relate ideas from one text to another . . . ask specific questions to clarify and extend meaning . . . [and] support inferences about information and ideas with reference to text features, such as vocabulary and organizational patterns.” At the end of the middle grades, students are to be able to “compare and synthesize information from different sources . . . distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information and between fact and opinion . . . [and] understand and use the text features that make information accessible and usable, such as format, sequence, level of diction, and relevance of details.” By the end of high school, students are to be able to “synthesize information from diverse sources and identify complexities and discrepancies in the information . . . make distinctions about the relative value and significance of specific data, facts, and ideas . . . [and] evaluate writing strategies and presentational features that affect interpretation of the information.”
In this set of example, note that each of these performance indicators is clear, specific, and measurable. Altogether they are sufficiently comprehensive in scope as well. But standards will not be strong if they are only clear, specific, measurable, and comprehensive—as necessary as these four qualities are. Statewide assessments based on standards with only these qualities may still get at little more than minimum competency.
Whether standards are formulated grade by grade or for clusters of grade levels (as New York’s are), they must, in addition, articulate meaningful and regular increases in intellectual complexity over the grades if they are ultimately to be judged as rigorous. Thus, readers should also note how each performance indicator shows an increase in complexity over the grades.
The second way in which readers can determine the rigor of their state’s English standards is by noting whether the level of reading difficulty expected for the achievement of a standard is made absolutely clear.
Are there titles of well-known works or specific reading levels required in the reading or literature standards to give teachers a clear reference point for the level of intellectual difficulty expected for achievement of the standard? Standards without any such requirements have omitted the essential component that makes a set of standards strong—and intellectually meaningful. And, unfortunately, this is a chief weakness in New York’s document.
The best documents with respect to their general literary requirements are California, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Virginia. Unlike New York (and most other states), they acknowledge the existence of a body of literary works known as American literature and require students to acquire a familiarity with this body of literature in varying ways. But even they have avoided spelling out in their standards how well students should be able to read by the time they are ready to graduate from high school. Unless legislators and other citizens take the time to insist that their departments of education, professional teacher organizations, and K-12 educators provide some literary specifics in their standards, they may not have standards worthy of the name.
The public can begin to regain confidence in its schools only when results from state assessments are based on standards it can understand and whose rigor is clear. If the public can’t understand the standards its department of education has put out, or has no means by which to judge their rigor, then it has no way to interpret the results of assessments based on those standards.
No, vague standards do not honor local control. This ostensible bow to local control in effect voids the whole purpose for state standards. Indeed, vague standards help deceive the public, whether or not they are intended to do so. There is no acceptable rationale for them because they are not standards at all. They are a gross misuse of the term, and the public and our legislators should not be fooled by them. As an editorial in the Trenton Times put it, “standards ought to be independently substantive.” If they are not, to base either a local curriculum or a state assessment on them is “like building a house upon quicksand.”