Standards 4.0: The Next Generation

Star Trek had a good run, helping a generation of kids, and perhaps a few adults, make the transition from a “duck and cover” mentality to a “live long and prosper” mentality, bridging the 1960’s with the 2160’s.  The standards movement must cross similarly difficult terrain.  Without skillful leadership and planning, standards will meet the fate of Star Trek characters – desperate pleas for attention (Kirk), burned to a cinder in outer space (Spock), or forgotten and irrelevant (McCoy).  I fear that the standards movement is now sustained only by the fleeting promise of federal funds and that the future remains in grave danger unless educators and policymakers make some fundamentally different decisions.  First, let’s consider the history that brought us from Standards 1.0 to the current state of affairs, and then identify the essential decisions that must be made to sustain the effort.

Standards 1.0 to 2.0

Standards 1.0, the first emerging consensus of what students should know and be able to do, were represented by McGuffey’s Readers, originally published in 1836, and ultimately influenced the education of more than 100 million students.  McGuffey, without a single federal or state mandate, set a standard for literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving that continues to endure as a model of high expectations for schools around the world.  Standards 2.0 were the state standards and had their genesis in the early 1990’s.  These served the nation well for two decades, dragging us from a century-long commitment to the bell curve to a new vision of educational achievement. Rather than compare students to one another, Standards 2.0 would compare them to an objective standard much in the same way we have done with examinations for drivers, pilots, and brain surgeons.  I have addressed this transition in greater detail in the chapter “From the Bell Curve to the Mountain” in the books Ahead of the Curve (Solution Tree) and Making Standards Work (Lead+Learn Press).  State standards were certainly better than the ambiguities of the bell curve, but they also retained some essential absurdities, such as the pretense that literacy was fundamentally different in Iowa and Indiana, that math must be redefined in Michigan and Montana, that scientific truth varied between Kansas and Kentucky.

Standards 3.0

The next generation of standards, Standards 3.0, is represented in the U.S. by the newly published Common Core Standards.  This is an attempt to bring the United States up to speed with the world’s other developed nations.  In France, Finland, China, Singapore, Korea, Australia, and the United Kingdom, to name but a few international leaders, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the two sides in every shire of the realm.  Politicians may dispute the quality of grapes, saunas, spices, graffiti, kimchee, kangaroo, and blood sausage in each of those jurisdictions, but they fundamentally believe that Pythagoras got it right.  As the United States seeks to reform its educational system in the most fundamental way since McGuffey first wrote his prescriptions for what every elementary student must know, the world’s current, but surely not last, superpower must address the same question: What does every third grader need to know?  The Common Core standards are only the beginning of the answer to that question.  It is easy to adopt resolutions by state boards of education to embrace standards.  It will be profoundly more difficult for the same political bodies to embrace the assessments, rewards, and consequences that accompany those standards.

Standards 4.0

If the standards movement is to survive into the next decade, then Standards 4.0 must become more than merely a list of performance requirements.  It must become a complete learning system.  The act of adopting standards – particularly when the motivation is financial rather than educational – means nothing.  Educational stakeholders – teachers, parents, students, leaders, and policymakers – must make three key decisions:

First, standards must be benchmarked against world-class learning expectations.  When I taught in China in the 1990’s, I had the opportunity to look at the English language section of the high school completion examination.  It demanded a level of knowledge of English grammar, usage, and punctuation that few of my graduate students could manage.  The political hand-wringing over history and science standards in Texas and Kansas is somewhat beside the point if students can’t read advanced texts, evaluate critically the claims of historians and scientists, and craft their own arguments with supporting evidence and compelling logic.  In too many educational debates, we fight about the details and neglect the essentials.  As I demonstrated in Transforming Professional Development Into Student Results (ASCD, 2010), McGuffey’s Fourth Reader includes prose that, 170 years after it was written, qualifies as 9^th grade reading.  Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman calls it the “ambition gap” – our students and their parents simply do not work as hard as our global competitors.  By setting low standards, we will have the worst of all worlds – whining students complaining of overwork, all the while their efforts misdirected so even those who achieve proficiency are capable only of making a more eloquent complaint.

Second, standards must be established not only for students but also for adults – teachers, administrators, and parents.  As an ethical imperative, no child will be more accountable than adults in the system.  One of the notable weaknesses of the Common Core Standards is the contention in the introduction to the documents that they should forswear any discussion of “how” to teach.  As I argued recently in Education Week, effective teaching is not a matter of personal taste, but rather a set of definable practices that are linked to improved learning. This does not mean that teachers are solely responsible for student test results. However, teachers and leaders are responsible for how they respond to student results. The best test to gauge our responsiveness to changing student needs is the answer to this question: How will the schedule, curriculum, assessment, teaching practices, and leadership strategies in your school be different in the coming year based on last year’s student data? The answer is almost always, “Things won’t be different. The schedule is set, the curriculum is already designed and the assessments are fixed by the state. Our teaching practices are pretty much up to the teachers and our leadership strategies are focused primarily on compliance with an unending stream of directives from higher governmental authorities.” If that description sounds uncomfortably close to reality, then do not be surprised if student results remain unchanged.

Third, standards are only one star in a learning constellation that includes assessment, curriculum, learning resources, effective teaching, and leadership.  Even the most carefully crafted standards are impotent without these other elements.  Changing standards while maintaining the same teaching, leadership, textbooks, and assessment systems is somewhat like repainting a house while leaving the plumbing, heating, and electricity all in disrepair.

We are at a crossroads.  One path will take us toward national consensus, coherent assessment and curriculum, and great opportunities for students irrespective of their neighborhood or birthplace.  Down that path lies not only educational rigor and opportunity but also global competitiveness.  The other path is that on which states will soon reach the moment of truth in which they must not only pledge allegiance to national standards and assessments in return for short-term funds, but also forswear some of their own local standards and tests. This is a bargain that is easy to make when there is no real consequence except for cutting down a few forests to publish more documents.  But what happens when the money runs out?  What happens when teachers say, “We still have only 180 days in the school year and we can’t do it all. What will we stop doing?”  At that point, standards will be ridiculed as another unfunded mandate and an infringement on local control.  As early as 2012, there will be governors and legislators who will run against national standards but who will also reject state standards, returning to the days in which educational expectations were solely the province of local schools.  One doesn’t win re-election – the prime directive of earth-bound politicians – by announcing that students (at least your students) need to work harder.  In this scenario, politicians will, true to the early days of Star Trek, duck and cover.  All that stuff about intergalactic understanding only works if you don’t have to run for reelection.