Common Core: 5. Standards and Standardization

In developing the Common Core State Standards the idea of standards has been confused with standardization. No one disagrees that standards for teaching and learning are needed. In the modern era American schools have always had standards, and those basic standards have not changed dramatically over the course of the past century. Universally the public wants schools to teach students to read, write, and compute at competent adult levels by the time they graduate.

At various times these 3R’s standards have been broadened to include more subjects, such as the sciences, the arts, social studies, physical education, and in various eras under a variety of labels manual arts/industrial education, cooking and sewing/homemaking, typing/computer science, and others.

When standards cease to be seen as basic goals toward which students and teachers should strive and instead become requirements that all students must meet, then a tipping point has been reached. Standards morph into standardization, which is detrimental because it means that students cease to be individuals with unique needs, interests, capacities, and desires. They become components in a corporatized system that demands conformity and uniformity. All the holes are round in this machine-like system, and students who are square pegs must be reshaped to fit.

The conflation of standards and standardization is reinforced by standardized testing, which has already spread to an unprecedented extent throughout American education. The Common Core promises more of the same.

“High stakes” tests are those that have a direct bearing on a student’s future. For example, in Indiana IREAD-3 is a high-stakes test at third grade because it determines whether a student will be retained in grade or allowed to advance. The Indiana Department of Education should make no claim—though it does—that this test is research based. Holding back students who fail IREAD in fact ignores a large, longstanding body of research on the detrimental effects of grade retention. For modest, short-lived gains in reading achievement, grade retention dramatically increases the probability that a student will drop out before completing high school.

IREAD standardization, like that of many high-stakes tests, is based on faulty logic. In truth, students learn to read at differing rates, some earlier, some later. While reading proficiency by third grade is a reasonable goal, it is not a make-or-break deadline. Treating it like one is foolhardy and dangerous.