Edited by Iris Weiss, Michael Knapp, Karen Hollweg and Gail Burrill, National Research Council
2001
Here we have yet another National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council report on education, this one paid for by the National Science Foundation and edited by two academics who served on the committee that did the study (Iris Weiss and Michael Knapp) and two National Academy staffers (Karen Hollweg and Gail Burrill). It starts with the so-called "national standards" in math, science and technology, all of them developed and issued by self-governing and sometimes self-interested private groups (the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Research Council itself, and a less familiar outfit called the International Technology Education Association.) The basic question addressed here is how to determine what difference those standards have made in the U.S. education system and what effects they've had on student learning. Yet that question stays unanswered. This volume simply builds an elaborate "framework" within which others can seek to answer it and by which people can interpret studies claiming to answer it. This makes for an unsatisfying document, more a guide to "how to look at this question" than an actual look. Meager as it is, there's still a problem with this approach, which resembles members of a track team devising the criteria by which their own performance will be judged in the high jump and relay race. There's much overlap between the developers of the standards being discussed and the authors and overseers of this report, which helps explain the loving stance that it takes toward the standards. In the case of the NCTM math standards, for example, we observe that Gail Burrill, one of the editors of this report, is a former NCTM president. The science standards discussed in this NAS/NRC publication were themselves developed and promulgated by the NAS/NRC. And the Academy extensively reviewed the technology standards before they were released. So there's something deeply self-referential here. There's also something reverential about it. Despite the fact that these are privately developed, voluntary standards, and notwithstanding that they have come under considerable criticism for their concept-heavy, skills-light, knowledge-thin, constructivist slant, they're simply accepted as gospel by the authors of this report. You may not want to bother but you can find ordering instructions at www.nap.edu/catalog/10023.html.
