On November 2, the American Federation of Teachers released a hefty (235-page) report entitled Making Standards Matter 2001. It's an ambitious effort to appraise academic standards, curriculum, assessments and accountability arrangements in each of the fifty states and for the country as a whole. With House Education Committee chairman John Boehner predicting that congressional conferees will complete work within a couple of weeks on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization, thus triggering further changes in state standards, tests and accountability systems, this review of where states are today is timely. (If you'd like to see it for yourself, surf to http://www.aft.org/edissues/standards/msm2001. Most of it is available in PDF format only.)
The AFT has previously evaluated state standards in the four subjects they regard as "core" (English, math, science, social studies). This is the first time they've also looked at state curricula, tests and accountability strategies. Having done so, the reviewers find many holes, gaps and inadequacies. "The bad news," says AFT president Sandra Feldman, "is that no state is coordinating standards, curriculum, tests and accountability measures. Very few states have developed at least basic curriculum, and most state tests are based on weak standards or don't match what is taught. The system needs a mid-course correction."
This is in many respects a needed and useful study that contains some sobering lessons. Perhaps the two most important are these:
- Twenty-one states don't yet have academic standards in place that meet even the AFT's relatively simple criteria (about which more below).
- "While every state asserts that its tests are linked to its standards, only eight states can actually document that they have aligned tests in the four core subjects at all three grade levels [elementary, middle, high school]. Thirty-one states and D.C. are administering one or more tests that do not meet AFT criteria for alignment."
This attempt at external appraisal of test alignment is new ground that's long needed to be broken, and for undertaking so complex and ambitious a task we salute the report's authors. (They are not named, unfortunately. Since Al Shanker's death and Ms. Feldman's ascension to the leadership, the AFT has become more of a personality cult, where able staff work now gets little public recognition.)
But there are problems here, too, best glimpsed by looking more closely at some of the AFT's criteria.
First, in appraising a state's academic standards, the teachers union reviewers looked for important formal elements, such as whether the standards are "detailed, explicit, and firmly rooted in the content of the subject area." Yet the reviewers then eschewed most of the tough content judgments. In a footnote, they admit that "In this report, we do not attempt to judge the overall quality or rigor of the content covered in each state's subject-matter standards. We do not try to determine, for example, whether the ninth-grade algebra standards in a given state contain the most salient content for ninth-graders. But the content must be specified." This is disconcerting, to say the least. It's akin to a concert reviewer saying "I looked to make sure the conductor and orchestra members each have a score in front of them, and an instrument in their hands, and each must visibly be playing his/her instrument, but I don't actually care whether they're playing Brahms or the Beatles, and I don't bother determining whether they're playing in the right key. Whatever they want to play is fine, so long as they have all the essential elements in place for the program they've selected." For an organization that has lauded E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge curriculum, this is astonishingly agnostic with respect to the particular skills and knowledge that children should learn in school.
Second, despite its agnosticism on content standards, the AFT wants every state to have a uniform curriculum in the four key subjects. "To be complete," says the new report, "a curriculum must be grade by grade and contain the following five components: a learning continuum; instructional resources; instructional strategies; performance indicators; and lesson plans." This is a huge leap - from standards to curriculum. Whereas academic standards typically spell out the knowledge and skills that children should have learned by the end of, say, 4th grade, a curriculum tells teachers what materials to use, what sequence to follow, even what lessons to employ each day (and, in the AFT's version, what classroom methods to use). This kind of thing many thoughtful reformers believe should be left to individual districts, schools and teachers to determine for themselves - and should be encouraged to differ in how they do it so long as all produce the intended results.
The AFT, however, apparently wants states to force schools and teachers into curricular straitjackets - and will mark them down unless they do this. This would pose huge problems for charter schools, magnet schools, specialty schools, alternative schools, "gifted and talented" programs, honors programs and just about every other form of school diversity and choice. (It also poses huge problems for great teachers with idiosyncratic classroom strategies and unconventional materials.) I have no problem with states publishing exemplary curricula that match their standards and illustrating student work that corresponds to a "proficient" score on the state assessment. Possibly that's all the AFT intends. But that isn't what the report says. To force instructional strategies, scopes-and-sequences, even lesson plans upon all of a state's schools and teachers is to strengthen the bureaucratic-compliance mindset and weaken efforts at school pluralism and choice. That is likely part of the AFT's game plan. Ironically, though, this approach also undermines teacher professionalism, which, one supposes, is not Ms. Feldman's intent.
Third and, alas, predictably, the union's ideas about "accountability" are limited to those that bear down on students. The report invokes two criteria here: whether "the state require(s) and fund(s) extra help for students having difficulty meeting the standards" and whether the state "has developed policies to encourage students to take learning more seriously by providing rewards and consequences based, in part, on state assessment results." So far, so good. But note what's missing: any "rewards and consequences" whatsoever for teachers and schools. In my view, it's unjust, even immoral, for a state to crack down on the kids while leaving their instructors and schools untouched. Yet that, too, is part of the AFT's policy game plan.
In sum, we have here a timely, informative, and in many respects valuable study that is deeply flawed by its sponsoring organization's agnosticism on academic content, hostility to school diversity and choice, and refusal to hold the grown-ups in the K-12 education system even the least bit accountable for its performance.
