Our Eternal (and Futile?) Quest for High Standards

Abstract

Most appalling, the standards of education are shockingly low, wrote the editors of Life magazine as they introduced a five-part series on the Crisis in Education--in March 1958! Life was actually late to the game. In 1892, James Mayer Rice had raised the cry for higher standards in a sizzling series of exposes in The Forum, a provocative and highly respected periodical. Life also was not the last to lament low standards. The College Board's 1977 panel on the SAT decline pointed to the changing composition of testtakers and a decade of distraction--and the turn away from high standards. Then, in 1983, A Nation at Risk lamented that tend to express our educational standards and expectations largely in terms of 'minimum requirements.' The current press for high standards can be traced to President Barack Obama's speech last spring to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce: Today's system of 50 different sets of benchmarks for academic success means 4th-grade readers in Mississippi are scoring nearly 70 points lower than students in Wyoming--and they're getting the same grade. Huh? A quick check revealed that in the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Wyoming's 4th graders scored 223 on reading while Mississippi's registered only 204. That's 19 points, and that's a big difference on scales, but it's not 70 points. The President, it turns out, was citing an obscure National Center for Education Statistics publication, Mapping State Proficiency Standards onto the Scales (2007), which tried to answer this question: If we take the score on a state test that qualifies a student as proficient, what would it correspond to on the scales? Answering that question, they found that a Mississippi 4th grader could be proficient with an score 70 points below what a Wyoming 4th grader needed. They also found that the two states were only 30 points apart at 8th grade, something the President's speech writer apparently didn't pass along to him. Although the President mentioned the stubborn gap between white and minority achievement, he did not note that only 1.5% of Wyoming's students are black or that only 30% of them qualify for free/reduced-price lunches. For Mississippi, the figures are 51% and 68%, respectively. Perhaps these factors play a bigger role in score differences than do differences in the rigor of the two states' standards. The NCES publication comes with a warning: These results should be used cautiously ... Good advice, because the report also noted, There is at best a weak relationship between the score equivalents for the state proficiency standard and the states' average scores on NAEP (2007: iii). In other words, some states with high standards do poorly and some states with low standards do well. To me, this seriously calls into question the purpose and utility of mapping state tests to scales. Still, shortly after the President's speech, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (many of them, of course, appointed by governors) announced a plan to develop a common core of standards. The draft college- and career-ready standards were revealed in September; the draft K-12 standards are due anytime now. The secrecy of the operation has suggested to some that the whole exercise is a sham, that the standards were already written, probably by Achieve, Inc., one of the partners in the project (along with the College Board and ACT). Complexity of Standards In a report this summer, Paul Barton of ETS provided a dispassionate view of our obsession with and failure to produce national standards. But I think it's telling that Barton closes with a quote attributed to Einstein: 'You should make things as simple as possible but no simpler.' Along these lines, the concept of national standards is complex, but out of necessity (2009: 41). …