People who know me know how ready I am to rail against standardized education. I have long believed in student-based teaching, so while I agree that we ought to hold our students to some level of excellence, the standards of that excellence should be established in cooperation with the students–each student should have not only the opportunity but also the obligation, the responsibility to participate in his or her education. I admit that with the exception of some seminars for an Upward Bound program in Texas and my work with teen creative writers in Wisconsin, I’ve never taught anything but college, so perhaps my educational ideals don’t translate quite as well to grades K-12. But I also grew up with an inside perspective on primary and secondary education: My mother is a lifelong schoolteacher and has taught virtually all elementary grades and some middle school, and she continues to teach third grade. Both my in-laws also are lifelong schoolteachers, serving not only in the classroom but also as librarian and UIL coach (my mother-in-law), and as bus driver, driver’s ed instructor, and principal (my father-in-law). My sister, too, is in education, working with pre-Kindergarten children. So I have a deeply familiar awareness of public education.
Which is why I find the current push for national education standards in the US so interesting. My inclination, of course, is to rail against the move, because standardization across whole states is problematic enough–standardizing over the whole nation is, my gut tells me, just asking for trouble. Susan Ohanian, herself a former English teacher and an opponent of the standards, seems to agree with me: According to a Washington Post article (found online through MSNBC), Ohanian “said standards deny teachers the ability to judge what should be taught and when. ‘If we don’t trust teachers to do that, then we have no business leaving them in the classroom,’ she said.”
Besides every academic’s pedagogical (or egocentric?) desire for classroom autonomy, though, I have another reservation about the current push for national standards. As the standards’ proponents and the Obama administration put their case, we need these new, more rigorous standards in order to make the US more competitive internationally. I agree that in terms of what we offer our students, the US has fallen far short of our promise (as any educator can tell you, the tragic irony of No Child Left Behind was that because it sacrificed educational rigor in favor of meeting arbitrary benchmarks, it wound up “leaving behind” more children than ever). Yet I have never viewed education as a competition, not between students or between schools, and so to view it as a competition between nations rankles me. In competitive education, some students “win” but a great many students lose, because the very nature of competition demands it. This is a part of America’s national identity, perhaps, at least since the Cold War–as Americans, we must beat “them,” whoever “they” happen to be in a given moment. Yet I have always been more collectivistic than individualistic, and I have long viewed the best education as cooperative rather than competitive. And in my view, raising our standards simply so we can “beat” some imaginary educational foe takes the focus away from where it should be: on the students, whose only competitive concern should be to exceed their own perceived capabilities, to become the best human being they are capable of becoming.
Still, I am pragmatic enough to recognize that standards do serve a purpose, and that properly designed and compassionately implemented, they can benefit students and education in general. The national standards movement, as it’s presented in the Post article, is interesting, and if I can dream of a utopia in which teachers maintain a significant degree of input into these standards, and in which the standards allow a wide breadth of flexibility, I can certainly admire the Obama administration and the pro-standards educators for the direction of their work. Because if we have to have standards, at least this movement is working toward elevating them, and anything that improves a quality of education, I can find a way to get on board with.
But these are just my thoughts, and the cooperative collectivist in me would love to hear comments from other teachers, especially those on the “front lines” of K-12 education. If you’re a teacher at any grade level (that includes college), leave a comment. If you know a teacher, pass this along and ask them to leave a comment.
Samuel Snoek-Brown 