Schlechty Center

By Phillip Schlechty

I recently received a copy of a report written by Paul E. Barton entitled “National Education Standards: Getting Beneath the Surface” from ETS (Educational Testing Service).  (Copies can be downloaded here.) The report is worth reading; in fact, I read it twice.

I came away feeling sorry that many of those who are pushing for national standards either do not understand the complexity with which they are dealing or do not believe it is really that complex—or they are somehow so blinded by their own agendas that they do not see what they need to see in order to do what they want to do.

Among other things, Barton reminds us that there are many kinds of standards: for example, opportunity standards, standards for what should be taught, and standards for what should be learned. Sadly, the standards of greatest concern to those who argue for national standards are usually limited to those having to do with standards related to scores on standardized tests.

Clearly, if we are to truly have national standards we need to think much more deeply about what we mean by the word standards. For example, what are the differences between and among the meanings of the words standard, goal, benchmark, and indicator? How does evaluation differ from assessment, and what is the difference between an assessment and a test? When the word test is used within the context of the standards movement, is the meaning limited to paper- and-pencil tests? When I ask my grandson to read to me so that I may figure out if he can read, am I testing him or is something else going on?

There are, of course, no nice, neat, and simple answers to such questions. Standards are not goals, but it can be a goal to meet a standard. Benchmarks are not standards, but they can be used to mark progress toward meeting a goal. Can benchmarks also be used to track progress toward meeting a standard? That, I suspect, depends on how we define the word standard. Indicators are, I think, things—conditions and attributes we are willing to take as evidence that some more abstract condition is also present or being met. Does this mean that indicators are more concrete than the condition being indicated? That too depends. Sometimes indicators morph into standards.  (That is what has happened with tests—or so I would argue.)

Tests are commonly referred to as assessments, but it is just as common to use tests to assess.  (In this latter case, tests are tools in an assessment process. What then are the other tools?) Is evaluation simply another name for assessment, or is evaluation something we do in the process of assessing? If so, what else do we do in addition to testing and evaluating? (Thinking and analyzing might be useful places to begin—and to end—an assessment process.)

Barton ends his very useful monograph with a quote from Albert Einstein which goes as follows:  “You should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Those who would use scores on paper-and-pencil tests as a substitute for standards make things simpler than they are. More than that, they threaten to render trivial and meaningless the idea that common standards are essential to quality education. 

The thing that makes standards common is that they are embraced (not simply complied with) by those to whom they apply, as well as by those who must see to their application. That is why I argued in my earlier blog that standards may well be national standards but their assessment and enforcement should be local matters.

The Devil Is in the Details

By Phil Schlechty

America’s experience with alcohol use and cigarette smoking should be instructive to those who are trying to develop and impose national education standards. What we might learn if we studied these matters is that standards that have any real substance cannot be enforced unless they are enforced locally. The Prohibition Amendment set a national standard of total abstinence from the use of alcohol. Many local communities only enforced the standard in a ritual way and closed their eyes to many illegal activities. As the life of Junior Johnson (the famous racecar driver) illustrates, high-stakes penalties such as going to jail for running booze were not a disgrace in some communities. Hell, Junior became a hero and a cultural icon and it was partly because he did not uphold the standard. I remember a case as late as the 1950s and 60s that involved an older female high school English teacher who hired high school students to run a still in her barn. She operated in this way for years and had many alumni. The federal officials never got to her but eventually local sentiment discouraged her.

Smoking cessation, on the other hand, is proceeding on a different course. Many more Americans do not smoke today (that is, they uphold the non-smoking standard) than was the case fifty years ago. The strategy used to produce this result is, however, based more on education than on coercion. Non-smoking in restaurants did not happen until there was enough local sentiment behind the standard to make the standard enforceable. (Most casinos still permit smoking for the simple reason that gamblers seem less likely to uphold the non-smoking standard.) The result is that so many Americans are now so committed to the non-smoking standard that they make smokers quite uncomfortable when smokers fire up a cigarette around them. (There was a time when commitment to the non-smoking standard was so weak that even asthmatic non-smokers were reluctant to challenge impolite smokers. No more!)

As Dornbusch and Scott observe in their book Evaluation and the Exercise of Authority, evaluations that count must be done by people who count. Applying formal sanctions and denying access to dollars will produce ritual compliance with minimum standards. These measures will not, however, inspire excellence. If the standards are high and if they require a commitment to excellence, then evaluations done by state and federal officials from far away count for far less than the evaluations done by local folks.

Equity and excellence go hand in hand, but they do not go hand in hand when we define equity as guaranteeing only mediocrity and more bureaucracy. What we need is an elite public education for nearly every child. What we are headed for is a situation in which local “elites” abandon the public schools, and the schools are transformed from community schools to government schools serving only the children of the poor, the ill-informed, and the uniformed.    

By Phil Schlechty

Governors and chief state school officers from 46 states and other members of the policy elite are threatening or promising to embrace common national standards. If they really mean common standards, this might not be a bad idea. Unfortunately, what will follow the development of national standards will be a drive for a common national test—a standardized test—to assess performance against the standard. The result will be that the test will become the standard and the standards themselves will recede into the background.

I don’t know whether the proposed national standards will be rich and powerful, but I do know that rich and powerful standards cannot be assessed from afar or with too much reliance on standardized tests. How do I know this is so? Two decades of state experience proves it to be so. The morphing of powerful standards into trivializing tests is the history of the standards movement in the United States. What we need are standards for assessing performance against national standards and a means of holding local communities accountable for ensuring that whatever standards they claim to uphold serve as the basis for local assessments.

Political leaders are wont to quote favorably the statement by Tip O’Neil, the longtime Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, that “all politics is local.” It is time they embraced the equally compelling notion that all assessments, if they are truly to affect performance, must be local as well. Test scores are not standards, even though state officials and bureaucrats tend to treat them as though they were. Test scores as they are currently used are either auditing tools or instruments to bludgeon teachers and local communities into compliance with standards they often do not understand and do not embrace as their own.

The strength of bureaucracy is found it its ability to standardize. It is not the characteristic of bureaucracies to inspire excellence. Thus, the standards that can be enforced by bureaucracies and by bureaucrats are designed to produce standardized education. The pursuit of excellence depends on the commitment of local communities to standards and the willingness of local publics to enforce the standards to which they become committed.

Standards may be a national concern, but the assessment and enforcement of standards is a local responsibility. What is needed are ways to ensure that local communities accept this responsibility. Rather than strategies for taking the responsibility for enforcing standards away from local communities and lodging it in government offices far removed from the schools and classrooms to which they apply, state and federal governments should be concerned with helping local communities and local publics develop the capacity to embrace and enforce the standards of excellence to which every child is entitled.

By Phil Schlechty

Five years ago I wrote a paper about NCLB entitled “No Child Left Behind: Noble Sentiment and Poor Design.” You can find it on our website at http://www.schlechtycenter.org/pdfs/nclb.pdf, if you haven’t had a chance to see it. My concerns at that time were many, but they can probably be summed up in the overall idea that federal mandates (funded or not!) aren’t always as helpful as they might be to leaders at the local level who are determined to shape their schools in ways that will be best going forward for kids, parents, teachers, and communities.

I know we’ve all noticed that the reauthorization of NCLB continues to be subject to background wrangling in Congress while the stimulus package takes center stage for the moment. But I believe that the reauthorization process has also become bogged down by the presence of several competing “schools of thought” about schools—what’s currently wrong with them, and how should we fix them? Perhaps more importantly, what purposes should they serve in this day and age, and how should we account for what they accomplish?

Over the years, three major views have emerged, views that tend to wind up at loggerheads in the public arena—and whose proponents have become ever more vocal and insistent over time. Perhaps reflecting the sort of un-civil “discourse” that now commonly takes place over the airwaves, proponents seem more interested in being heard than in hearing one another—to everyone’s detriment. This is reminiscent of the Tower of Babel.

Here’s my surface-level take on the three views:

1. The first holds that the schools produce too many students who cannot demonstrate the ability to master basic academic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics (the basic skills and standardized testing argument).
2. The second holds that the schools produce too few students who have the capacity to create, solve problems, work productively in groups, and think critically (the 21^st century skills and global competitiveness argument).
3. The third holds that schools produce too few students who know what they need to know about the core academic subjects to be considered reasonably well-educated (the cultural literacy argument).

Each of these arguments contains values worth our consideration. I don’t believe, however, that this is a matter of “either/or.” Our children need and deserve the opportunity to develop themselves in ways that take all three views into account. Why should they not? And I also believe that it’s possible for public schools, rightly conceived and oriented, to be quite successful at helping young people develop such competencies. But it worries me that we do our communities a disservice if we allow argument about these important issues at the local level to descend into acrimony, for such issues really provide an opportunity to engage citizens in some of the most important dialogue that we might have about our communities and our democracy.

Why should we be waiting for word from Washington when we might instead engage our public in the kinds of dialogue that we’ve let fall into disrepair? Is it not the responsibility of public school leaders to engage the public in conversations regarding all three of these views and ways to reconcile them in service to the common good?

I expect to be writing extensively on this topic in the near future, and I would be glad to have your thoughts on these matters to inform my thinking. Is one or another of these arguments dominant in your community? Why is that the case? Are you having a Tower of Babel experience? What degree of success are you having in either moderating the arguments or in facilitating genuine, productive dialogue? Why is that the case?

I look forward to your thoughts in response to this, our first blog…