For those who want defer accountability for another generation, the New (Shiny!) National Standards are just the thing. We can spend months just determining, as State Board Chair Duncan Wyse recommends, whether these standards are appropriate for Oregon's children. (What would that mean, exactly? Would we compare the proposed National Standards to the Oregon standards? Or would we look at the National Standards without reference to the Oregon standards and assume that their appropriateness was unrelated to our own work of the past 20-or-so years? One has to assume that the new National Standards, in order to be appropriate for Oregon, would have to bear a striking resemblance to the Oregon standards...in which case, tell me again why there need to be National Standards? And if there truly do need to be National Standards, why are we bothering to determine whether they are appropriate to Oregon? Who is Oregon to stand in the way of this new national necessity?)
Fun with words. And that's all any standards are. O.K. That's not all they are. They are also a colossal waste of time and money. O.K. They are more than that. They also buy time for those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep the target moving so that education will be in a constant state of retooling toward a new, re-envisioned definition of always-receding, eventual, someday success. And moments before we fail, we will shift the target again, as we did with the 10th grade math benchmarks and the now-defunct Math Problem Solving Assessment.
This is all eerily similar to Orwell's vision in 1984, in which a constant state of war,though with ever-revolving enemies, was necessary for the economy. Some purpose is served, it seems, by keeping education in a constant state of crisis but with regard to an ever-shifting threat...economic failure, social inequity, athlete's foot...
National Standards. A new measure against which to declare our utter failure (watch while ODE declares the silver lining is that we have now shined a light on the problem!), resulting in the need to convene committees, hire consultants, race to various tops, scramble for money, break large schools into small ones, combine small schools into large ones, put our right feet in, put our right feet out...
Can we not get serious? Does this game of 'shuffle the money' ever get boring? Does it get embarrassing, after awhile, to continue to pretend to know the way forward while chasing after every shiny object that catches our eyes?
National Standards. I know it's a joke, I'm just not sure who's in on it and who are its victims. I will say one thing without hesitation, though, in all seriousness. Not a single student will receive a better education as the result of our attention to this nonsense. Not one. And there is no evidence to the contrary, anywhere.
