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"Turn to page 3 in your answer booklet. Follow along while I read the sample question aloud..."

Sound familiar?! Every year in school students take standardized tests.  This is to ensure that all students in your state are learning the same thing in every subject. The goal of these standards is to prepare students for higher levels of education, where they will be expected to have a certain amount of content knowledge. The standards, however, have always been determined by each state.

The Common Core Standards Initiative is pushing for states to adopt common education standards. Their website says, “Common standards will help ensure that students are receiving a high quality education consistently, from school to school and state to state.”

The idea is that we, as a generation of young people, will be better prepared if we are all prepared the same way - according to a researched and rigorous set of academic standards.

How will this affect the classroom environment? Will every classroom start to sound and look the same? Will we all become identically-minded, without an individualized sense of our own learning? According to an article in Education Weekly published last week, the standards are, “based on two flawed assumptions: that we somehow, in 2010, don’t already know what to teach (we do and have for decades); and that somehow a standard body of learning matches what humans need and what a democracy that values human freedom wants (it doesn’t match either).”

The article argues that creating standardized standards, or really standards at all, takes away from the best learning possible. “Standards-driven education removes decisions from teachers and students and renders classrooms lifeless and functional, devoid of the pleasure and personal value of learning, discovering, and coming to be.”

I can personally relate to this debate. I was an eighth grade English Language Arts teacher for the past two years, and I remember the long nights trying to figure out the best way to get my students to master the difference between the five kinds of consumer documents, because that piece of knowledge was in the standards. I remember looking at my long-term calendar and freaking out because I still had three standards to cover in the two weeks before testing arrived! 

I also remember being thankful for some guidance in terms of which things were most important to teach. Then, there were those glorious teachers next door to me, who had been teaching since the beginning of time, and never bothered with standards because their main focus was to excite students about learning. If a new student asked a question every day, then it was a successful day.

The article says, “Yes, we should have high expectations for teachers and students, but those expectations can never be and will never be any more “standard” than one human to the next. To standardize and prescribe expectations is, in fact, to lower them.”

Creating common standards assumes that teachers need to be “tightened up” a bit in terms of sticking to the important stuff in their classrooms. The Common Core Standards Initiative website says, “Standards do not tell teachers how to teach, but they do help teachers figure out the knowledge and skills their students should have so that teachers can build the best lessons and environments for their classrooms.” The assumption is that WHAT teachers are teaching and HOW they teach it is a big contributing factor to the poor state of U.S. education.

The article in EdWeekly disagrees. “A call for national standards is a political veneer, a tragic waste of time and energy that would be better spent addressing real needs in the lives of children—safe homes, adequate and plentiful food, essential health care, and neighborhood schools that are not reflections of the neighborhoods where children live through no choice of their own.”

The article sums up their point, “The truism “Give a man a fish and he eats for the day; teach a man to fish and he eats forever” captures perfectly the flaw with a standards approach to education: Prescribed standards of learning are giving children fish, not teaching them to fish.”