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Find more Kappan articles in the Staying with the Standards Movement Next to "All children can learn at high levels," the most frequently heard phrase in education reform these days seems to be "This, too, shall pass." It has most often been attributed to teachers, whose answer to wave after wave of faddish clamoring that they do things -- indeed, everything -- differently has been to dig in, close their doors, and wait for the hype to die down. Considering the suspect quality of some of the ideas and programs that have washed over the schools in recent years, teachers' patience in playing this waiting game has probably been quite sensible. However, a remarkable switch is taking place. Now teachers and principals in many places are staying the course and holding steady in the desire to set higher standards for students. It is the politicians-turned-reformers who act as if they want it all to pass. A recent headline in Education Week warned that the standards movement is in trouble, but the article also pointed out just how much federal officials have been waffling in their efforts to carry out the intention of Goals 2000 to support reform through higher standards and new assessment systems. Whatever the states have wanted to do -- no matter how much it violated the original intent of the standards legislation or how much it became mired in political rather than professional issues -- the states have done, with the blessing of (or at least with no demurral from) federal officials. In some states controversies have erupted, and open processes have turned into closed-door decision-making sessions about what students should learn. The reason? Politicians, including governors and state board leaders, decided that they knew more than anyone else. Meanwhile, Congress killed the technical assistance process, which would have created a council to develop voluntary criteria for standards and so might have helped some states avoid acrimony. A year ago this month, the second Education Summit ended with great enthusiasm over an agreement between governors and business leaders to establish an ongoing effort to keep standards and accountability on everyone's agenda. As I write this, Achieve -- the name at long last given to this effort, once known as "the entity" -- still did not have a director and had no more money than the $5 million that had been pledged immediately after the Summit. At the winter meeting of the National Governors' Association, Achieve was mentioned only briefly as an item of current business. At the Summit the governors pledged to establish "internationally competitive academic standards, assessment tools, and accountability systems" within two years. Time is running out. With their "revolution" having pretty much run out of steam, House Republican leaders have abandoned their pledge to do away with the U.S. Department of Education and are seeking to carry out their agenda "incrementally," according to staff members. All of this will take place in a spirit of bipartisanship, they hasten to add. Yet the first "bipartisan" action out of the gate took the form of field hearings to shape education legislation. These hearings, labeled "Education at the Crossroads: What Works and What's Wasted," are set to focus on parent involvement, basic academics, and the ways in which money gets into classrooms. Meanwhile, the Democrats are concentrating their legislative efforts on help with capital expenses, literacy programs, and technology. Congress approved a generous amount for Goals 2000, but the leadership now deems the focus on standards-based reform as worthy of only routine notice as one item in a long list of programs that are up for reauthorization. In addition, President Clinton's continued rhetoric about reform through higher standards probably just strains the veneer of bipartisanship even further. This is his agenda, not theirs, the leaders of the Republican Congress seem to be saying. Sen. James Jeffords (R-Vt.), chair of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, seems more interested in finishing up work on programs that have expired, while Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) echoes the interest of the House leaders in parental rights and school choice. Standards-based reform, once a truly bipartisan effort, apparently isn't the stuff that excites the public -- in particular, those who vote -- unless the standards are perceived to violate constituents' ideas about what their children are learning. Perhaps standards and assessments have entered the less accessible world of technical detail and so need more focused and careful attention than political rhetoric can deliver. The issues might now have come down to how to define and produce standards comparable to those of other advanced countries and how to create assessment systems that are fair and serve multiple purposes. Those are not enthralling issues, but they are nonetheless real. While the politicians waver in their commitment to standards-based reforms, serious and genuine work to transform what students learn and how well they learn it is taking place in schools and districts around the country. Spurred by state legislation on standards and/or by new assessment systems, as well as by Goals 2000 funding to districts, a great many people are learning a great deal about what it means to set higher standards across a district or state. The issues for them are how to find the time and the expert help for a teaching force that is ill-prepared for standards-based reform in classrooms and how to match new assessment systems to the new standards. Once the standards path has been chosen, everything in sight must change. The school districts that have adopted higher standards are realizing that, just as "seat time" for students is being discarded as a measure of success in school, teachers' seat time in irrelevant staff development programs must be replaced. Teachers must spend time together learning what constitutes good student work and what doesn't meet standards. Teaching to the test -- for so long the dominant mode of education in this country -- is being transformed into teaching to the standards. (Assessments and performance standards are becoming interchangeable.) If students are to be evaluated according to how well they meet performance standards, then how do we transform traditional ABC report cards so that they reflect these different values? In such states as Colorado, Maryland, and Kentucky, every district, every school, and every teacher faces challenges like these because of statewide efforts to reform standards and assessments. Indeed, most other states are moving in this direction as well. More than just the cultures of schools, districts, and teacher preparation institutions is being updated in this process. In Long Beach, Corpus Christi, El Paso, Pueblo (Colorado), and Philadelphia -- districts that are among the leaders in standards-based reforms -- even the most experienced and confident teachers find that their classroom lives are changing. They may need to give up their most cherished units or strategies, for example, because these do not address what the teachers and their colleagues have decided students should know. In San Diego and New York City -- districts that have adopted the New Standards frameworks and exams -- veteran teachers are learning for the first time what it means to have a "thinking curriculum." Just as the business sector invests in managers when it undertakes significant change, so school districts are finding out that professional development for principals is as important as it is for teachers if standards-based reforms are to be successful. This is very tough work. Where standards-based reform has gone beyond the rhetoric and become the core of school improvement, people realize that the way ahead requires long-term investment, informed leadership, and a great deal of per-sistence. All of these are lessons that national leaders appear never to have learned. ANNE C. LEWIS is a national education policy writer living in the Washington, D.C., area (e-mail: aclewis@crosslink.net). |
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