Countries with centralized standards and national tests are eager to undo rote learning and nurture creativity.
Hold Schools Accountable, but Don’t Standardize Learning
Bruce Fuller is professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Updated January 25, 2011, 11:23 AM
After showing robust vital signs in the 1990s, test scores have flat-lined in recent years. According to President Obama and a bipartisan majority of governors, the way to fix that is to develop a shared set of curricular standards.
It makes sense. The early days of standards-based accountability clearly produced gains, especially for children with weak literacy skills. And common standards push states to define in uniform ways which students are truly proficient. (Right now a child deemed a "proficient" reader by officials in Texas is reading at the below basic level in Massachusetts.)
But will national standards rekindle student progress, or prove to be an illiberal reform from a progressive president? Arne Duncan, Obama’s education secretary, points to Germany and Japan, where centralized standards and national tests coincide with strong student performance. Yet correlation does not prove causality. And these societies are eager to undo rote learning and nurture greater inventiveness among their graduates – a key driver of technological advances and value-added returns to the national economy.
The strange thing in all this is that the political left is now preaching the virtues of systems, uniformity and sacred knowledge. Lost are the virtues of liberal learning, going back to the Enlightenment when progressives first nudged educators to nurture in children a sense of curiosity and how to question dominant doctrine persuasively.
Sure, all children must first learn how to read. But standards will likely be swallowed as sacred knowledge, transmitted through efficient didactics, oddly endorsed by contemporary liberals.
The Obama administration is wisely trying to get back to a surgical way of holding schools accountable: distill the complicated enterprise of human learning down to concrete, uniform bundles of knowledge. Then, stimulate local educators to devise more motivating classroom practices, spurred by market competition from charter schools and parental choice.
But standards threaten to further routinize pedagogy, filling students with bits of reified knowledge -- leaving behind the essence, the humanistic genius of liberal learning.