1 a Critical Analysis of the Modern Standards Movement

A Critical Analysis of the Modern Standards Movement: A Historical Portrayal Through Archival Review, Written Documents and Oral Testimony from 1983 to 1995 Prologue This historical study was done to tell the story behind educational reform efforts to write the revised Standards of Learning (1995) in Virginia. The history was collected in two distinct ways. First a thorough and extensive review of written documents was conducted including archival records and personal papers of key informers. Second a thorough collection of oral testimony was done which yielded three hundred pages of testimony from eleven key informers. The history could have been written from either source, but the decision was made to use both. In that way, it was hoped that oral testimony would enliven the documentary history and give insights so often missing from mere chronicles of events. 1 Chapter One Rationale and Methodology for the Study In June of 1995 the Commonwealth of Virginia published Standards of Learning for Virginia Public Schools (Commonwealth of Virginia), and in September of 1997 published Standards for Accrediting Public Schools in Virginia (Commonwealth of Virginia). The publication of these two documents and the implementation of state-mandated tests in Virginia in the spring of 1997 were the culmination in that state of a standards-based reform movement that began in 1983 with A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (known henceforth as A Nation at Risk) (National Commission on Excellence in Education). Indeed, the implementation of standards tied to accountability in Virginia was part of a much larger national movement that was often fraught with controversy. An understanding of the modern standards movement and the controversy surrounding it lies in retracing the history and objectively analyzing the reports of key advocates and protagonists. To fully comprehend how the Virginia standards were developed and implemented, and the current and past political and educational controversy they engendered, it is necessary to place the standards movement in a larger historical context and to analyze reports of key decision-makers and key events. Controversy Surrounding the Virginia Standards The Standards of Learning for Virginia Public Schools and the Standards for Accrediting Public Schools in Virginia have received national attention from certain sources that have recognized them as being outstanding and noteworthy. In a recent measurement of education reform in fifty states, Virginia was at the top of the list of states for standards and assessment (Jerald, Curran, & Olson, 1998, p. 80). The reason given for this was that “Virginia topped the 2 list on standards and assessments. Its standards got high marks for rigor and specificity” (Portner, 1998a, p. 258). The American Federation of Teachers’ special report, Making Standards Matter, 1997, read as follows, “Virginia’s standards are extraordinarily clear, focused, and well grounded in content. Their grade-by-grade and course-by-course structure ensures that they will be useful to teachers and other school staff regardless of the grade or subject they are involved in” (p. 1). Virginia was the only state which the AFT report rated as having “Exemplary Standards” in all four-core academic subjects¾English, math, science and social studies. Ravitch (1997), a former assistant secretary in the United States Department of Education in the Bush administration, commented on the Standards of Learning for Virginia Public Schools, along with its accompanying Standards for Accrediting Public Schools in Virginia, in this way: There’s a battle going on in Virginia whose outcome will reveal whether it is possible to have real reform in public education. The Virginia State Board of Education has a clear strategy. In 1995 it established high academic standards in English, history, science and mathematics. The next year it developed tests based on those standards. This year it established “standards of accreditation” for schools tied to student performance on the test . The Virginia Board intends to make standards count and to end automatic promotion . Virginia’s academic standards are widely regarded as among the best in the nation. These standards clearly specify what children should learn in each grade . Many other states refer to them as a model. (p. 106) Despite numerous compliments, the Standards of Learning for Virginia Public Schools and the Standards for Accrediting Public Schools in Virginia have critics at home. Virginia teachers criticize the “one-size-fits-all approach to schooling” and worry about the implications 3 for accreditation (Welsh, 1998, p. C3). Principals comment that the standards ask students to memorize rote facts and are too narrow (Manzo, 1997). Barth (1998) addresses the dichotomy of being wonderful and terrible at the same time and gives reasons why, despite the good attention they have received, she believes they won’t work. Everybody, it seems, loves the Virginia Standards of Learning. They earn high marks from many quarters, from politicians and conservative pundits to the American Federation of Teachers. As a result, they have become widely used resources for states engaged in their own standards-setting. Indeed, policy makers in states as different as California and Massachusetts have held up the Virginia standards as an ideal of what state standards should be . There are two major reasons the Virginia standards won’t work. First, the so-called big ideas of the disciplines get lost in the specificity . The second major problem with the Virginia standards is their rigidity in requiring students to meet standards at each grade level. (p. 41) The standards, as they are written in Virginia, will affect students’ graduation requirements and school accreditation (Commonwealth of Virginia, 1997). In addition, Virginia will join other states such as Florida, Oklahoma, Maryland, Texas, and Wisconsin by issuing report cards for individual schools (Portner, 1998b). These two factors, accreditation and the publication of school-by-school report cards, are possibly the most controversial issues that the standards movement faces. General Controversy Surrounding the Standards Movement Accountability is an outgrowth of the standards movement and many states are trying to implement some sort of accountability system. According to Olson (1998): 4 Accountability is the third side of an education triangle that also includes standards and assessments. Now that many states have adopted high standards and tests to measure students’ progress toward those benchmarks, they have turned their attention to making sure that performance matters. (p. 3) This accountability piece is the third side of the triangle which brings with it implications for school accreditation, as well as for graduation confirmation. Policy makers, such as those in Virginia who have put a great deal of time into educational reform, now want results - outcomes - to show that the taxpayers are getting their money’s worth. Finn (1997), a former assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration and an advisor to Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, assails the education system for what he sees as a failure to produce information on outcomes. Nearly all reports on the performance of the education system are issued by the same people who run the system. There is no counterpart to what the corporate world knows as the independent audit. This structural reality, combined with the strong desire of the establishment to persuade its constituencies that the system is succeeding now, plus the aversion of most educators to tests, comparisons, competition, and “high stakes” accountability, means that nobody has good, clear, timely, reliable, actionable information about how anyone is doing in relation to how they ought to be doing. (p. 241) Berliner and Biddle (1995) take another perspective on accountability that differs from Finn. A major Neoconservative buzzword for our times is accountability. As funds for public education have become more threatened, many Neoconservatives have proposed programs that would tie funding for schools or salaries for educators to “objective” 5 performance indicators such as average-gain scores on standardized tests, ratings of teaching performance, or numbers of students going on to higher education or landing suitable jobs. And this means that the efforts of local schools are to be controlled through state or federal mandates. (p. 195) Berliner and Biddle (1995) see accountability programs as unfair because they involve competition among schools that are not on the same level playing field due to extremes of wealth and poverty. Above all, income maldistribution creates problems because it is very difficult to provide good schooling for impoverished students who may come to school hungry or in cast-off and torn clothing, who suffer from untreated medical problems, who live in neighborhoods that are rife with crime and violence, or who come from homes that lack even basic amenities – let alone books and other supports for education. (p. 219) Lewis (1995) cites Sizer, founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, as disagreeing with the standards movement “. because of the likelihood that it will lead, once again, to test- driven instruction. Furthermore, government-sponsored standards ignore the realities of resource-poor schools and teachers who lack support for changing their instruction” (p. 749). Newmann, King and Rigdon (1997), writing in the Harvard Educational Review,

Load more