StickWithANose

This NBC piece covering Arne Duncan’s “listening” tour of think-tank conferences and charter schools demonstrates the conflation of two educational concepts that have no necessary relation, except in a practical sense. Ostensibly, the article is about Arne’s use of his stimulus bribe money to push states to adopt a national set of tough academic standards, but the article inadvertently points toward a problematic feature of the standards debate in general: the linkages between standards and assessments.

It will be up to states to adopt the new standards. But Duncan has been using his bully pulpit to push the effort — and now he’s using Washington’s checkbook, too. He said spending up to $350 million to support state efforts to craft assessments would be Washington’s largest-ever investment in encouraging a set of common standards.

The logic of the standards debate in its current form goes as follows: The way to develop a common set of rigorous academic standards is through the development of assessments designed to measure the degree to which students will have achieved rigorous academic standards. Beyond its circularity, what is apparent here is the conflation of two educational concepts, standards and assessment, that is neither necessary nor productive.

Personally, I have no problem with establishing a national set of academic standards delineating the educational goals we [as a nation] deem necessary for future citizens to become productive members of society, but the devil is in the details. The most successful nations in terms of educational achievement all have national academic standards in one form or another. For example, Finland continues to score at the top of the PISA international assessment, and the Finnish national core curriculum [ie. curricular standards] makes for a fine example of a national set of academic goals that speak to the complexity of learning.

Two aspects of Finland’s core curriculum are of particular relevance here. First, the core curriculum is notable for its generality and lack of specificity. Second, there are NO standardized assessments linked to the core curriculum. Assessment in Finland is of the formative variety. What is notable about these two characteristics of Finland’s core curriculum is the degree to which they reflect what research literature tells us about learning and effective assessment AND the degree to which they contradict the on-going narrative at work in Arne’s public relations tour.

According to the useful tools public intellectuals on this side of pond, clear [easily assessed] goals are THE most important element of rigorous academic standards… an assertion most often couched in the ideals of market efficiency and an assumption of rational market-educational actors. Indeed, it is the corporate ideology behind the standards movement that both defines Arne’s proposals and points toward the dangers inherent to them. Today’s reformers come from the corporate world, and they see all educational issues as being market issues. [If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!] Markets require clear, quantifiable data to function properly ergo a successful education sector requires clear, easily quantifiable data. The problem is that a truism associated with capitalist markets is not necessarily translatable to all other sectors of society, especially not the education sector.

Learning is a cognitive event that is complex and not uni-directional. “For that reason, at least for challenging content, it may be difficult to write clear and simple standards, thereby making their operationalization for curriculum development, test construction [of any genre, objective or authentic], and alignment between the two problematic.” [1] The idea that rigorous academic standards can be distilled down to a clear, easily-assessed essence is prima facie problematic. Further, assuming the possibility or desirability of constructing easily assessed academic standards, the multiple-choice assessments associated with standards reform are constructed using psychometric frameworks similar to methods currently poisoning the dismal science. Research has consistently shown that these forms of assessment primarily measure students test-taking abilities, mask a great deal of heterogeneity in student skills, and provide inadequate data for educational decision-making by teachers and policy-makers alike. [2][3][4] In short, from the perspective of public education, there is no justification for the kind of standards reform Arne is pimping across America. To find its justification you must turn to the corporate world, and that is the point.

The conflation of academic standards with assessment is part and parcel with the corporatization of American schooling. There are no educational justifications involved. Reason would dictate that academic standards and goals should be developed in such a way so as to do justice to the complexity of the intellectual skills involved first. Only then should the question of how to best assess student achievement of said curricular standards be addressed.