Beyond Standardization: Powerful New Principles for Improvement

Abstract

WE ARE entering an age of post-standardization. Improvement in terms of tested achievement has reached a plateau. The curriculum is shrinking, classroom creativity is disappearing, and dropout rates are frozen. Top-down prescriptions without support and encouragement at the grassroots and local level are exhausted. If you find that you are in the midst of another grueling year of trying to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) targets, if you dread teaching the standardized literacy program that your district has adopted, and if your classroom coaches and mentors have turned into curriculum compliance officers, then post-standardization might sound like more academic argot coined by ivory-tower intellectuals. But hold on! Especially when we look beyond the American context, signs are emerging that the era of market competitiveness between schools in delivering standardized curriculum and teaching practices is on its last legs. High-stakes and high-pressure standardization, where short-term gains in measurable results have been demanded at any price, have turned many U.S. schools not into learning-enriched environments, but into enervating Enrons of educational change. (1) When policy makers turn up the heat; define reading, writing, and math as core subjects to be tested; and threaten to close struggling schools that can't make AYP and to disperse their pupils, educators respond--and with a vengeance! They slash social studies at the same time the country is internationally isolated; they skimp on science when there is unprecedented global competition for technological breakthroughs; and they decimate the arts, foreign languages, and physical education with the prospect that America's next generation will be uncouth, uncultured, and unfit. And what has the U.S. gained from its obsession with raising test scores? Although more time has been spent on language arts and math since 2001, this has come at the cost of reducing time for such subjects as science, history, and the arts. (2) NAEP reading scores for 4th and 8th graders have remained flat for more than a decade. Math scores show more encouraging signs of progress, especially for pupils in the bottom 10th percentile, so here we have the proverbial silver lining in the dark clouds. (3) But U.S. teachers have suffered mightily through the nation's new policies, and they resent it. Only 15% indicate on surveys that the No Child Left Behind Act is improving local education, (4) indicating a loss of faith in the government's ability to galvanize the very people who care the most about educating this nation's children. Confronted by data on the limits of existing strategies and challenged by the economic need for increased innovation and creativity, a new shift in education reform is upon us. This is already evident in recent developments in Finland, Canada, England, and the United States. Beside and beyond standardization, each of the alternatives outlined here contains different theories of action, of how and what to change, and carries different consequences--though all, to some degree, wed proposals for future change with traces and legacies from the past. Finnishing Schools In January 2007, with colleagues Gabor Halasz and Beatriz Pont, one of us undertook an investigative inquiry for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) into the relationship between leadership and school improvement in one of the world's highest performing education systems and economies: Finland. At the core of Finland's success and sustainability is its capacity to reconcile, harmonize, and integrate elements that have divided other developed economies and societies--a prosperous, high-performing economy and a decent, socially just society. While the knowledge economy has weakened the welfare state in many other societies, a strong welfare state is a central part of the Finnish narrative that supports and sustains a successful economy. …