How specific? There are many reasons policymakers seek to impose detailed curriculum mandates. They may fundamentally distrust educators: Much of the current standards movement is just the latest episode in a long, sorry history of trying to create a teacher-proof curriculum. Alternatively, they may simply assume that more specificity is always preferable. In reality, just because it makes sense to explain to a waiter exactly how I'd like my burger cooked doesn't mean it's better to declare that students will study the perimeter of polygons (along with scores of other particular topics) than it is to offer broad guidelines for helping students learn to think like mathematicians.

The latter sort of standards, supported by practical guidance, can help students reason carefully, communicate clearly, and get a kick out of doing so. But long lists of facts and skills that teachers must cover may have the opposite effect. Thus, when Harold Howe II, the U.S. commissioner of education under President Johnson, was asked what a set of national standards should be like (if we had to adopt them), he summarized a lifetime of wisdom in four words: they should be "as vague as possible." 

His caution applies to state standards as well. On the one hand, thinking is messy, and deep thinking is very messy. On the other hand, standards documents are nothing if not orderly. Keep that contrast in mind and you will not be surprised to see how much damage those documents can do in real classrooms.

Considerable research has demonstrated the importance of making sure students are actively involved in designing their own learning, invited to play a role in formulating questions, creating projects, and so on. But the more comprehensive and detailed a list of standards, the more students (and even teachers) are excluded from this process, the more alienated they tend to become, and the more teaching becomes a race to cover a huge amount of material. Thus, meeting these kinds of standards may actually have the effect of dumbing down classrooms. As Howard Gardner and his colleagues wisely observed, "The greatest enemy of understanding is 'coverage.'"

Some insist that these lists of facts and skills don't prescribe how students will be taught; the standards are said to be neutral with respect to pedagogy. But this is nonsense. If the goal is to cover material (rather than, say, to discover ideas), that unavoidably informs the methods that will be used. Techniques such as repetitive drill-and-practice are privileged by curriculum frameworks based on a "bunch o' facts" approach to education. Of course, that kind of teaching is also driven by an imperative to prepare students for tests, but no less by an imperative to conform to specific standards.

Some people sincerely believe that to teach well is to work one's way through a list of what someone decided every nth grader ought to know. But the question is not just what you or I think about that model; the question is whether that model should enjoy virtual monopoly status in American public schools. In effect, one particular, very debatable philosophy of education has been enshrined in state standards documents and has become the law of the land.

How quantifiable? The current accountability fad insists on mandates that are not only overly detailed but chosen according to whether they lend themselves to easy measurement. It's not just that the tests are supposed to be tied to the standards; it's that the standards have been selected on the basis of their testability. The phrase "specific, measurable standards" suggests a commitment not to excellence but to behaviorism. It is telling that this phrase is heard most often from corporate officials and politicians, not from leading educational theorists or cognitive scientists.

We are talking about a worldview in which any aspect of learning, or life, that resists being reduced to numbers is regarded as vaguely suspicious. By contrast, anything that appears in numerical form seems reassuringly scientific; if the numbers are getting larger over time, we must be making progress. Concepts like intrinsic motivation and intellectual exploration are difficult for some minds to grasp, whereas test scores, like sales figures or votes, can be calculated and charted and used to define success and failure.

Unfortunately, meaningful learning does not always proceed along a single dimension, such that we can nail down the extent of improvement. As Linda McNeil of Rice University has observed, "Measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning." (That sentence ought to be printed out in 36-point Helvetica, framed, and tacked to the wall of every school administrator's office in the country.) To talk about what happens in schools as moving forward or backward in specifiable degrees is not only simplistic, in the sense that it fails to capture what is actually going on; it is destructive, because it can change what is going on for the worse.

Consider a comment made by Sandra Stotsky, the deputy commissioner of education in Massachusetts: "Explore isn't a word that can be put into a standard because it can't be assessed." This assertion is obviously false because there are plenty of ways to assess the quality of students' exploration—unless, of course, "assessment" is equated with standardized testing. But suppose for the moment that Ms. Stotsky was correct. What if we really were faced with a trade-off between an emphasis on exploration in the classroom and the demands of measurement? Most thoughtful educators would unhesitatingly choose the former, whereas those who write and enforce state standards often opt for the latter. Clearly, it is much easier to quantify the number of times a semicolon has been used correctly in an essay than it is to quantify how well the student has explored ideas in that essay. Thus, the more emphasis that is placed on picking standards that are measurable, the less ambitious the teaching will become.

How uniform? We have heard the phrase "standardized testing" so often that we may have become inured to the significance of that first word. To what extent do we really want our students to receive a standardized education? At a national conference last fall, a consultant announced with apparent satisfaction that now, thanks to standards-based reform, "for the first time in my experience, people on a grade level, in a subject area, or teaching a course at a high school are [feeling] a responsibility to all have the same destination." That she did not even feel it necessary to defend this goal says something about the current acceptance of a one-size-fits-all model of education.

Once again, the problem is not just with the construction of the tests, but with the uniformity of the standards. Wanting to make sure that students in low-income communities don't receive a second-rate education is a laudable objective. Wanting to make sure that all students in your state receive the same education, such that they are treated as interchangeable recipients of knowledge, is a very different matter. Even more troubling are grade-by-grade standards. Here, the prescribers are not just saying, "We expect students to know the following stuff by the time they're in 8th grade," but "We expect them to learn all the items on this list in 5th grade, all the items on that list in 6th grade," and so on. Apart from the negative effects on learning, this rigidity about both the timing of the instruction and its content creates failures unnecessarily by trying to force all children to learn at the same pace.