The real standards

Varieties of Error
    By Darcy Miller

It always seems easier to talk about something than to do it. Ever since Bill Clinton, LAW '73, another "education President," came into office almost six years ago, there has been a lot of talk at the federal, state, and local levels about improving education. The latest bill being discussed (or rather argued about) in Congress is Clinton's plan for national testing. American students fall behind all the other industrial countries in math scores, and aren't all that proficient at reading, either. So the newest plan is to "raise the bar": require a higher level, and teach at that level, in the hope that most students will be able to adjust and learn.

I won't criticize the federal government for recognizing a basic psychological principle: if you teach children that they cannot succeed, it is unlikely that they will. But there is something lacking in educational reform that places such high emphasis on outcome in the form of standardized scores. There is something is wrong if principals are willing to risk losing their jobs by changing test sheet answers. There is something missing in our country if schools derive their legitimacy from numbers. Schools, and the government, are busy looking at the output: "Did it work? Did they learn?" They are not so busy, perhaps, at looking at the input: "But what did they learn?"

What students learn depends on the answer to another question: "What do we want them to learn?" And right now, institutions seem to have all the answers. In elementary and high school, we want students to gain a general background in a few standard subjects, neither delving into any of them in depth, nor exploring any of the other subjects that don't fall under one of the five or six major categories. College becomes the place to study the "extra" subjects, or to explore more deeply specific areas of interest.

But by the time we get to college, the question of what we are supposed to learn has been answered, and college only reinforces it. We're supposed to learn to write well, to apply ideas, to think. Maybe we write better, think better, see more connections to our ideas; but we still write and think and connect in the ways we have learned to do, with the values we have grown up with. Intelligence leads to high scores, high scores translate into success. The lessons of high school, and the strong reinforcement of those lessons in college, teach us what we need to succeed as individuals in the competitive real world.

How can we learn, not only what we need, but what is needed from us? How can we learn to succeed, not only as individuals, but as citizens in our society? Algebra and grammar just don't help. Maybe history could, if we used it for its values instead of its dates. High scores on Regents and SATs mean we know how to learn within the right framework; and if we choose to, we can use that framework to acquire the skills to succeed. But a generation of students with high SATs says little about society's skills for success. They don't tell us about prejudice or patience, about cooperation or compassion. Though they may tell us something about problem-solving with calculators and on paper, they don't tell us about problem solving with people, with competing needs, in the world.

If we want to succeed as a society, and not just on our own, we need to start with education. President Clinton knows that, our Congressmen know that, every American knows that. But we need to strive for something better than more algebra, more vocabulary, and higher board scores. If the federal government really wants reform, it needs to stop debating the costs of implementing national testing, and start looking beyond the numbers for a new answer to the question of what shall we learn. It needs to start exploring a way to teach, not only equations, but basic values that help our society function, like leadership, participation, and integration.

Beginning that exploration certainly won't be easy. Neither will uncovering those values that are so fundamental to human understanding of how society best functions, that they are neither debatable nor partisan. Such a search requires a new framework, a new examination of the possibilities of what schools can teach and what students can learn. But it is essential. Because whatever the costs of national testing, the costs of never searching for our common values--of never discovering the legitimacy of education that recognizes the social importance of those values--are even greater.

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