How Ed Reform Is Done

[teacher gal]

Cross-posted at GD


The following letter-to-the-editor, published in Education Week, is by Professor David Marshak of Seattle University.

Education Week
Published Online: August 31, 2009
Published in Print: September 2, 2009
LETTER
Common-Standards Process: Rigged From the Beginning?

To the Editor:

The national-standards-development timeline of the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, and Achieve Inc., a key player in the endeavor, is a dead giveaway to the closed, predetermined nature of the process ("Openness of Common- Standards Process at Issue," Aug. 12, 2009).

July 2009: Work groups are named.
July 2009: Three weeks later, draft college- and career-readiness standards are complete.
December 2009: The entire draft K-12 standards in language arts and math are complete.
January 2010: The standards are approved, and the effort to blackmail the states into signing on begins.

Anyone who has ever done curriculum- or standards-development work knows immediately that this timetable signals a process in which the end product has already been decided upon at the beginning.

This project is entirely closed off from educator and citizen engagement. And, as usual, there is not a single person on either development team who actually interacts with children or adolescents— just a bunch of directors, managers, and associates.

It is typical of the arrogance and stupidity of American educational policy development in our time that we have the policy developed exclusively by people who have no personal engagement with the institutions of schooling, people who are bureaucrats and paper- pushers and wouldn’t know how to engage a child if their ample salaries depended on it.

Of course, this is the logical conclusion of modernist consciousness, to which living wisdom is irrelevant. And this negation of wisdom is one of the key reasons that all of our modernist institutions are collapsing.

No doubt national standards and national tests will be shoved through, which will lead inevitably to ever-greater efforts to transform our schools from places with real educative purposes into test-prep factories.

David Marshak
Bellingham, Wash.

[teacher gal]

1. Something tells me I should stay off of DU

It starts with a "U".

[jinto86]

2. I know Iowa is a weird state...

What with us not even having state education standards until a year or two ago, but I had a professor who was also a high school english teacher (night class), who worked on the state standards. From the way she talked about it, it seemed like educators were making most of the decisions. I could be wrong about them making most the decisions... but then again... like I said before, Iowa is a weird state.

[LWolf]

3. To clarify, this is how the current movement towards

national standards is being handled?

No educator input.

I wonder if they know, remember, or care, that, according to Marzano at least, the standards we currently have on the books would take kindergarten through grade 21 to effectively teach?

I'm sure, with a process that quick, they are cobbling stuff together from the 50 versions of state standards already out there. (?)

That's why education reform doesn't work, and why things keep getting worse. Educators are deliberately cut out of the process.

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. 50 sets of standards and one way to hold us all accountable

Makes perfect sense! LOL

[LWolf]

5. Of course it does.

At least as much sense as every other mess politicians make of "reforming" public education. ;)

It's more efficient than having actual educators direct the reforms.


Isn't it? :eyes:

[PVnRT]

6. I'm curious, do they have experts making these curricula?

I know the American Chemical Society is working hard to create national chemistry standards, and to my knowledge, they aren't shutting teachers out (because many teachers are members of ACS, who even has a yearly award for high school teachers).

A schedule that compressed for a government project is going to turn out garbage. Believe me, I work for a government contractor; it happens every damn day.