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THE DEADLY EFFECTS OF "TOUGHER
STANDARDS"
"[The main effect] of the drive for
so-called higher standards in schools is that the children are too
busy to think," said John Holt in 1959. Four decades later, policy
makers are pursuing just such a heavy-handed, top-down version of
education reform. The results: schools have been turned into giant
test-prep centers, the intellectual life has been squeezed out of
many classrooms, and some of the best educators have gotten tired
(or fired).
This seminar, by the author of THE
SCHOOLS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE, invites participants to explore five
fatal flaws of the Tougher Standards movement:
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It gets motivation wrong.
Leading students to become preoccupied with how well they are
doing in school can undermine their engagement with what they
are doing. Paradoxically, a single-minded concern with results
can reduce the quality of learning - along with the desire to
explore ideas.
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It gets pedagogy wrong.
Standards are often defined as a long list of forgettable facts
that students must know, or else. Moreover, teachers are
encouraged to stick with the sort of traditional instruction
that has now been shown by the best theory and research to
interfere with deep understanding.
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It gets evaluation wrong. In
practice, "excellence," "higher standards," and "raising the
bar" all refer to scores on standardized tests, many of them
multiple-choice, norm-referenced, and otherwise flawed.
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It gets school reform wrong.
Tougher Standards are usually seen not as guidelines but as
mandates, with "accountability" a code word for tighter control
over what happens in classrooms by people who are not in
classrooms.
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It gets improvement wrong.
Weaving its way through all these ideas is the implicit
assumption that harder is always better. The result is that
tests, texts, and teaching have not become more rigorous but
merely more onerous.
This workshop concludes by helping
participants to see that the push for Tougher Standards is not a
reality to be coped with but a political movement that can be
opposed. Practical strategies are suggested by which educators can
pursue a more thoughtful vision of teaching and learning. |
