Standards are not curriculum.
Standards do not teach.
Standards do not limit what can be taught or learned.
Standards do not dictate how anything will be taught or learned.
Standards do not cause, create, require, or otherwise have any sort of dependency relationship with standardized tests.
The standards argument ticks me off. I love standards. I love standards so much that I hate when they are misused and misrepresented. Of late, they are being misrepresented by teachers, by the very people who should understand them the most. Standards should be tools that feel so familiar in a teacher’s hand that the exact bundle the teacher is thinking of can be easily selected without looking or stumbling. In fact, to the onlooker, it wouldn’t appear that anything standards-related was happening.
The misrepresentations I’ve been hearing would lead the observer to believe standards dictate that on the third Monday of the school year, every second grade math teacher will lead the students in reciting addition facts; and on the 30th Monday, the students will, in choreographed unison, draw and count arrays while intoning, “Three plus three plus three is nine. Three times three is nine.” I exaggerate. I hope I exaggerate.
In truth, standards do not say when or how skills should be taught. Curriculum says when and how. I repeat, standards do not say when or how.
Standards tell a parent, “Hey, your kid should know how to add a few numbers together by the end of second grade, so it’s okay to challenge your kids to keep score in a short game.” Standards tell a third grade teacher that covering addition of two-digit numbers is a review topic at the beginning of the year, so they can confidently acquire more complex resources for the classroom. Standards tell the school librarian that these topics are definitely going to be covered, so it is worthwhile to invest in resources that support those topics. Standards tell a passionate parent or teacher that schools will need tools that support certain skills so that parent or teacher can start a business and count on making a living by providing a service that is needed. Standards are guidelines that everyone involved in education can count on and build on.
I’ve learned about standards in three completely different fields. First I studied education standards while getting my bachelor’s degree. I thought they were the greatest thing since toast (I still do). I wanted to walk into a classroom with them and say, “Hey, look what we have to learn this year! What amazing things do you want to do and create in order to learn them?” I pictured a student-run magazine like Elliott Wigginton’s class that started Foxfire. Or now when I imagine it, I think of the classes that have invented alternative energy sources. (Note: That’s not the exact example I was looking for–please reply with more awesome examples of what can happen in classrooms.)
“But wait!” says the skeptic, “What does running a magazine and engineering stuff have to do with standards?” Everything. The kids who started that magazine satisfied every requirement in their social studies, language arts, and math standards. Throughout the year, the teacher could have stopped the class and taught them a little about metacognition. He could have said, “Hey, remember those standards I said we needed to cover at the beginning of the year?” And the kids could have groaned and said, “Yeah, but do we really have to do them? We’re so busy running the magazine. We need to figure out how many pages it has to be, and which printer will cost less, and schedule interviews, and write and edit, too!” And while they were rattling that off, he could have been checking off standards. He could have said, “Look what you’ve learned! Did you even know that you were learning? This is what learning is supposed to be like. It’s exciting. It’s part of life. It’s something you’ll want to pursue every day forever.”
Standards are purposefully worded as blandly and neutrally as possible. Why? It may be easy to think that’s because the writers are prescribing that the topics be taught in the most bland way possible. But really, it’s because the writers are leaving room for the curriculum designers, teachers, and students to cover the standards in whatever way they think is best. This is what I learned about standards in my second field: architecture and engineering. I taught people to use software for writing building specifications, which from hereon out, I will call specs. Specs are incredibly lengthy documents detailing exactly how a building should be constructed. It describes the windows, the roofing materials, the plumbing, and so on, for parts of buildings I didn’t even know existed until I learned to teach that software. There are two kinds of specs: architecture-based and performance-based. Architecture-based specs say exactly what brand to buy and exactly how big to make it. Performance-based specs instead say, “Use a product that can handle this kind of foot traffic and provides this kind of feel to the room.” They do not specify how to meet the requirements, they only say what requirements need to be met. This leaves the architect with room to be creative and still guarantees the owners a space that will meet their needs.
Specs in architecture are not standards. Specs reference and depend on standards. Standards say that a two-by-four will measure 1.5″ by 3.5″ and that cables of a certain grade will be able to hold a load of this weight when installed using particular guidelines. In addition to specs and standards, there are codes. Codes require that buildings are able to keep inhabitants safe from whatever conditions are probable where the building is located. This includes using products and construction methods that handle hurricane winds, flooding, and earthquakes.
To me, education standards are similar to a combination of performance specs, standards, and codes. There is not a one to one correspondence between the fields, but the spirit of performance-based specs is what I believe is intended by the writers of educational standards. They do not specify the curriculum, location, tone, or time of the learning. They merely say, “By the end of second grade, kids should know what multiply means so that their next teacher can build on that knowledge.” The skeptic says, “And if they don’t know how to multiply, the teacher gets fired.” Only if the standards are misused. If a kid does not know what multiply means by the end of second grade, yes, it’s a symptom of something, but it’s not a diagnosis. It’s a symptom that the teacher, student, parents, and principle need to look at and address on a student-by-student basis. A teacher for whom standards are well-worn tools will be able to explain that the student has excelled here and here, but has not met this one here. The teacher can show what improvements were made and lay out a path the student can follow when the student is ready.
The third field in which I learned about standards is web design. They have just as passionate an argument about standards in their field as education does. In fact, you can almost replace “web” with “education” in the arguments and have a hard time telling which is which. The smartest people in web design, though, are arguing for web standards. They argue for them because following standards guarantees accessibility, which means all of your students can access knowledge. Web standards mean that no matter what tool you use to get to content, you can see the content, or hear it with a screen reader.
Standards are like a binding agreement, where teachers and administrators get together and say, “Yes, I believe it is important that students have these skills. We will do what we can to help students learn these skills.” If you don’t believe the standards require things that are important for students, then get involved in those standards. That’s how the people who write the standards got involved.
Thank you for reading my rant. I hope it wasn’t too preachy or snarky.
