Jay Greene has a smart, sobering piece on national standards. “People tend to be in favor of them when they imagine that they are the ones writing the standards,” he notes. “But when everyone gets into the sausage-making that characterizes policy formulation, it generally becomes clear that no one is going to get what they want out of national standards. What’s worse is that the resulting mess would be imposed on everyone.”
Jay also quotes Sandra Stotsky on the sausage-makers:
Instead of choosing nationally known scholars to chair and staff these committees–to assure us of the integrity and quality of the product–the NGA and the CCSSO have, for reasons best known to themselves, treated the initiative as a private game of their own. The NGA and the CCSSO haven’t even bothered to inform the public who is chairing these committees, who is on them, why they were chosen, what their credentials are, and why we should have any confidence whatsoever in what they come up with.
While not writing about national standards, Mark Bauerlein at the Chronicle of Higher Education might as well be in describing the inevitable conflicts and disappointments when it comes time to choose texts in curriculum meetings.
Traditionalists in the room want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas, and on various grounds of historical influence, civic inheritance, and aesthetic virtue they stick with a generally Eurocentric tradition. Progressivists want to enlarge the canon and contexts, to give representation to other cultures and identities, and explode the reigning “normativities,” and they resist a core knowledge of any kind being set down as official.
The result is satisfying to neither side, he notes. ”There doesn’t seem to be any way out of the impasse,” which Bauerlein thinks “partly explains the rise of the skills’ movement in education circles.”
““But when everyone gets into the sausage-making that characterizes policy formulation, it generally becomes clear that no one is going to get what they want out of national standards.”
Historically speaking, this was probably true when there was a move to state standards as well, right? Of course back then, the “culture wars” weren’t so flamable…
-Nathan
If the hope is to come up with standards say (for example) all 8th graders should read “To Kill a Mockingbird” and all 9th graders should read “Inherit the Wind” it’s going to be an exercise in futility.
However, I don’t think its unrealistic to develop guidelines about what the scope of a high school English class looks like with a more-inclusive-than-not list of suggested books.
There’s no shortage of knowledge (and even skills) that it would be great for students to have acquired before they leave high school. It would be a mistake for these committee to be sweating the detail (Is Romeo and Juliet appropriate for 9th graders? Is West Side Story? Is the answer different depending on what role gang violence plays in a student’s community?). What they need to be doing is working at the level of “We expect student that a student finishing high school has read X of these Y Shakespeare plays.”