Today, Jay Greene has an Ed Next column arguing against government mandated standards and curriculum. “Most of the important elements of American education are already standardized,” he argues.
No central government authority had to tell school districts to divide their schools into grades or start in the Fall and end in the Spring. Even details of the curriculum, like teaching long division in 4th grade or Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, are remarkably consistent from place to place without the national government ordering schools to do so.
Schools arrived at these arrangements through a gradual process of market competition and adaptation….Of course, not everything is synced, but the items that are most important to consumers often are.
That’s how standardization in market settings works and we have a lot of positive experience with this in industry. VHS became the standard medium for home entertainment because the market gravitated to it, not because some government authority mandated it. If we followed the logic of Gates-Fordham-AFT-USDOE we would want some government-backed committee to decide on the best format and provide government subsidies only to those companies that complied.
Instead of ending up with VHS, they may well have imposed Betamax on the country…
Of course, many people agree that Betamax had the superior technology (the picture was sharper, the cassettes were smaller, it was better at high-speed duplication, etc.). So, in effect, market forces standardized the inferior technology.
But rather than belabor the VHS-Betamax analogy, let’s talk about the actual case of state standards. Is Greene correct in his contention that the market was on its way to standardizing high-quality state standards? Not even close.
In fact, for more than a decade we have been conducting a natural experiment where we let market forces drive standards setting at the state level. The result? A swift and sure race to the bottom. A majority of states had failed to set rigorous standards for their students—and had failed to create effective assessments that could be used to track student mastery of that content. In fact, the whole impetus behind the Common Core State Standards Initiative was to address what was essentially a market failure in education.
That said, I do agree with Greene that too much government intervention will stifle innovation. That’s precisely why I think government “standardization” should begin and end with standards. Let the government define what students should know and be able to do. Then let market forces determine which curricula and pedagogy will best help students master that essential content.
–Kathleen Porter-Magee
I have a lot of respect for Kathleen and hence I am stumped.
She writes that the results of the NCLB’s “natural experiment” with states setting their standards are clear: “A swift and sure race to the bottom.”
Yet just a few years back no other than the Fordham Institute itself examined this exact issue, the behavior of proficiency standards under NCLB, and declared:
“These trends do not indicate a helter-skelter ‘race to the bottom.’ They rather suggest more of a walk to the middle.”
Perhaps Kathleen meant to write about the rigor of content standards rather than proficiency standards. But there, too, many states have improved their standards, rather than lowering them. This can be clearly visible in — yet again — Fordham’s own recent “State of the Standards” report that shows that in 2010, 27 state ELA standards were graded worse than in 2005 and 11 improved (with 12 grades unchanged). In math only 10 state standards were graded worse and 29 improved, with 11 graded the same. I might add that grading criteria in 2010 were more demanding than in 2005 as can be clearly seen from Massachusetts’ standards that did not change between 2005 and 2010, yet were graded lower in 2010 than in 2005. In other words, by Fordham’s own analysis — of which Kathleen must be aware as she co-authored it — state content standards have improved somewhat over the years.
So which one is it? Is there a race to the bottom, or isn’t there? Based on Fordham’s own research there was an improvement in content standards and no race to the bottom in proficiency standards. Yet Kathleen is unequivocal in claiming a race to the bottom. Is it a simple error, or has Fordham started to twist its own findings in its push to support national standards?
In addition to the misleading claim of “race to the bottom” that Ze’ev notes, Kathleen’s post is in error on two other points:
1) VHS was not the “inferior technology.” It was cheaper, had longer tapes, and the market clearly preferred those things over whatever qualities Betamax possessed. Kathleen’s conviction that she and some central government-backed committee of like-minded people know what is best for the country regardless of what the market says is precisely the problem with the Gates-Fordham-AFT-USDOE effort to nationalize key aspects of education policy.
2) The claim that Kathleen and Fordham want no more than to nationalize standards without touching curriculum, pedagogy, or assessment is simply disingenuous. For example, Checker once again made common cause with the AFT, Linda Darling-Hammond, etc… in backing the Shanker Manifesto, which calls for “Developing one or more sets of curriculum guides that map out the core content students need to master the new Common Core State Standards.” Checker may claim that this effort is purely voluntary, but that would only be credible if he and Fordham clearly and forcefully opposed any effort by the national government to “incentivize,” push, prod, or otherwise require the adoption of national curriculum based on the already incentivized national standards. And of course, USDOE (without any opposition from Fordham that I have noticed) is already moving forward with developing national assessments even before national curriculum has been developed. One does not need to be from one of “the more feverish corners of the blogosphere” to recognize the odd coalition of Gates-Fordham-AFT-USDOE as coordinating an effort to nationalize key aspects of our education system.
UPDATE –
Kathleen Porter-Magee sent me an email observing that I was incorrectly attributing to her a view that Checker (and I assume Fordham as an institution) holds but she does not. She favors national standards but has no desire to nationalize curriculum and assessments. I apologized for my error and told her I would correct this on the blog. But I added:
“I think the distinctions you make between standards, curriculum, and assessment are too subtle for a movement that is clearly about nationalizing all of these. You may only want the first, but they want all three. And by helping the first you just facilitate the other two. In the end standards are just a bunch of words. The assessment and to a lesser degree curriculum really drive the boat. So supporting national standards while opposing national curriculum and assessment at best is an exercise in empty words and at worst is a gateway drug to nationalizing all three.”
Jay,
Thanks! To be clear, though, I fully support state-led standards AND assessments.
And, I don’t think the distinction between curriculum and standards/assessment is too subtle. On the contrary, plenty of states have set standards and assessed those standards without diving into the weeds of curriculum or pedagogy. It strikes me that the state has a clear role in helping to determine an acceptable minimum set of content standards that all students need to master to earn state diplomas–and to determine whether the students have, in fact, learned that content.
Where states get into trouble is when they try to hard to dictate how students should learn that content (via state-mandated curriculum, textbooks, and/or pedagogy). States should stick to defining and measuring outcomes.
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