The Standards Narrative

The problem in American education is not a lack of standards. The
problem is poverty. Our students from middle-class families who attend
well-funded schools score at the top of the world on international
tests. The US has the highest level of child poverty among all
industrialized countries. If all our children were protected from the
effects of poverty our overall international test scores would be
spectacular. (Steven Krashen, NCTE Forum, 8/19/11)

We can malign the Common Core Standards or the people that formed them, but they only offend in how we read and interpret them. Of themselves, the Standards are fairly innocuous, but when politicians and educators start to use them as weapons in the guise of school reform, they become blunt instruments for sensitive operations.  I agree with Stephen Krashen that the Standards have to be viewed in context of poverty and prosperity, but that does not make them irrelevant.

Performance standards can reveal the inequity between students in privileged and disadvantaged settings almost as effectively as the statistics that indicate poverty and limited resources.  They can show how much growth to expect in a harsh environment where  nutrition, health, and family stability are at risk.  They hardly reflect the quality of teaching going on in these settings, and anyone who implies that they do, understands nothing about public schooling. The problem with Standards begins when schools and teachers are judged by them without consideration of the communities they serve,  and when teachers become the scapegoats for communities without resources.

The worst feature of the teacher quality movement is the sweeping comparisons made between teachers, schools, and districts as test scores are scrutinized.  The notion that student performance in the inner city can be compared with students in the comfortable suburbs is pernicious and elicits defensive statements about SES and overpopulation of special needs students in mainstream classes.   Until these odious comparisons are made, teachers are more apt to consider their students a work in progress, without reference to their unusual needs.  Standards are no threat to teachers, until some administrator or politician suggests that students should be meeting them uniformly without consideration for their environment.

Teachers of the urban and rural poor never divest themselves of responsibility for educating students as they receive them, just as the ninth grade teacher accepts the graduates of eighth grade, regardless of how prepared they are for the rigors of high school.  The only time you hear teachers complain about the ability of the students in their classes is when someone suggests that they are to blame for student performance.  Then you will hear about the poor preparation in the feeder elementary school, about the high percentages of special education students assigned to a class, about the failure of the home environment to provide an English-speaking reinforcement of lessons learned in school.  Then you will hear about poverty in the community, how it stunts learning.

But on a good day or a day when no one has pointed a finger at their school or their class you will not hear teachers writing off their students to poverty or disadvantaged settings.  They identify with the plight of their students and adapt how they teach to the limitations of the students they have.  They work harder to teach the students with language deficits and minimal work habits.  They celebrate every sign of progress, even if it falls short of the Standards they hope their students will meet. Teachers  are rarely heard to say, ” I can’t teach impoverished students.”

My former principal was fond of saying, “They send us the best they have,” particularly if we were griping about the regular resistance we faced in our classrooms.  His homespun philosophy could wear thin over the long school year, but everyone on the faculty knew the truth of this.  We played the hand we were dealt, and everyday tried to learn how to play it better.

In public education we accept our students as “the best they have.”  We never speak of inferior raw materials  or substandard products, because we are working with human beings.  We take them as we find them and bring them along as far as we can. Many teachers miraculously engage unmotivated students, but may only creep slowly toward the Standards. The assessments that measure such improvement are crude instruments. We can read progress in many ways, standardized tests the least of them.

When we read the Standards and how our students fail to achieve them in a timely fashion, we should interpret them as the failing of our society to provide the basic physical needs and the language-rich environment in every neighborhood and community. If we choose to read them as product controls and our students as manufactured goods, we will read poorly. But if we read them with enlightened minds, the Common Core Standards could represent national, local, and neighborhood goals, goals that drive our social conscience as well as our curriculum.