Standards-based reform has become America's main strategy for boosting student achievement, strengthening school effectiveness and renewing our education system. It undergirds President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" Act as well as the reform efforts of nearly every state and community.
As everybody knows, standards-based reform rests on a tripod of academic standards, testing and accountability. It is an elaborate behaviorist scheme for altering the actions and priorities of students and educators in order that children end up learning more and schools end up producing stronger results.
But standards-based reform works only upon the outside of education's "black box," not on what happens inside the classroom. Its eventual success, therefore, is determined not by lawmakers but by teachers and pupils whose everyday decisions and priorities actually shape what is taught and learned. Once that classroom door is shut, the teacher is in charge. What she deems important, what she cares about, how she spends her time - all these have immense impact on what her students end up learning.
One way to find out what teachers judge to be important is to ask them. Though plenty of surveys have been conducted over the years, few have probed teachers' views of key elements of standards-based education reform. So the Manhattan Institute, with the help of the University of Connecticut's highly regarded survey research center, decided to investigate. Its report came out last week. ("What Do Teachers Teach? A Survey of America's Fourth and Eighth Grade Teachers," Christopher Barnes, Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute, September 2002)
Working with a national sample of 4th and 8th grade classroom teachers, it inquired into their educational philosophies and instructional methods, their view of standards and their curricular priorities. The results are revealing and more than a little alarming. Five findings display a chasm between teachers' views and reformers' expectations.
First, a majority of teachers in both 4th and 8th grade opt for "student-directed learning" rather than "teacher-directed learning." No more than two in five affirm a philosophy of education in which the adult in the classroom sets the agenda, decides what youngsters will learn and ushers her pupils toward that destination. "Student-directed" learning is an old progressive-educator notion. It means that children's own interests matter more than a pre-set curriculum in shaping what teachers and pupils work on in class each day and what approach they take to learning. Yet it's nearly impossible to imagine standards-based reform succeeding in places where students decide what will be learned - or even how it is learned. Standards-based reform presupposes that teachers take charge of prescribing the skills and knowledge to be learned - and persist until their young charges actually learn those things. Plenty of research shows that teacher-led instruction matters most for disadvantaged kids. [For starters, see The Academic Achievement Challenge, by Jeanne S. Chall, New York: The Guilford Press, 2000.]
Second, three quarters of teachers have embraced the college-of-education dogma that the purpose of schooling is to help youngsters "learn how to learn" rather than to acquire specific information and skills. Barely one in seven believes that educators' core responsibility is "to teach students specific information and skills." When evaluating pupil work, just 25 percent of 4th (and 28 percent of 8th grade teachers) place primary emphasis on whether students supply the right answer or correct information. Yet standards-based reform is all about the successful acquisition of specific information and skills. Few would deny that schools should also assist their pupils to "learn how to learn" more in the future. But standards-based reform cannot succeed where that is deemed to be the school's chief mission. Nor can it succeed where teachers put greater stock in student creativity and effort than in accuracy.
Third, not even two-fifths of 4th grade teachers base the pupils' grades primarily on a "single, class-wide standard"; most place heavier emphasis on individual youngsters' abilities. In other words, they opt for a relativistic mode of evaluating achievement instead of an unchanging, objective standard. (This is also the case with nearly half of 8th grade teachers.) Yet the essence of standards-based reform is judging students according to their success in meeting a fixed standard of learning. How unfortunate it will be if kids grow accustomed in class to relativistic grading practices, only to be hit by an unyielding standard on the statewide exam at year's end. How confusing for them and their parents-and how damaging to standards-based reform.
Fourth, teachers do not have terribly high expectations for their pupils. Despite the endlessly repeated mantra that "all children can learn" and Congress's assertion that no child will be left behind and all will attain their states' core academic standards, teachers do not quite buy that. Fewer than half of those teaching 4th grade expect their students always to spell correctly. Less than half of 8th grade math teachers expect all their students, by year's end, to be able to show why the angles of a triangle add to 180 degrees. (One quarter of 8th grade math teachers do not even expect this from a majority of their pupils.) Only 70 percent of 8th grade history teachers expect that, by the time they enter high school, most students in their classes will know when the Civil War was fought. What does it mean for Congress to mandate that every child in every state will (within twelve years) attain "proficiency" on state standards when many classroom instructors have no such expectations? Though the survey didn't ask, we can fairly assume that the kids for whom teachers harbor lower expectations are those from poor and minority neighborhoods and troubled homes - those who traditionally have been most apt to be left behind.
Fifth and most bluntly, one third of 4th grade teachers and 30 percent of 8th grade teachers do not agree that "a teacher's role is primarily to help students learn the things that your state or community has decided students should know." In other words, they seemingly don't believe in state academic standards at all. At least, they don't see helping youngsters meet such standards as the school's core mission.
There's no point in castigating teachers, much less the conscientious instructors who cooperated with this survey, for harboring these attitudes. They are what they are, what they've been molded into by those who trained them yesterday and supervise them today. For the most part, their attitudes, expectations and priorities, as well as the methods they employ when the classroom door is closed, reflect the influence of their ed-school professors as well as mentors and peers within the schools and the profession.
The problem is that the professors and the profession have not entirely bought into standards-based reform. It goes against their grain. It contradicts their philosophies of education. Never mind that it's the law of the land, the principal public-education dynamic of nearly every state, and the strong preference of most parents. Where well implemented, it also boosts student achievement, especially for disadvantaged youngsters. Yet it hasn't permeated the education profession. Hence it hasn't percolated into many teachers. The problem ahead is that policymakers - and parents, voters and taxpayers - are destined for a whopping disappointment if what happens when the classroom door closes does not advance the goals that were so hopefully enshrined in those statutes, those hard-fought standards, and those sometimes onerous accountability systems. An education train wreck may lie ahead.
A version of this editorial appeared in Sunday's New York Post.
