NEW YORK—April Rose teaches at P.S. 132, an elementary school in Springfield Gardens, Queens. She spoke with enthusiasm about the last round of education reforms hitting her classroom after an August education forum. Some may have worried about her third-graders facing their first standardized tests last April, but she exuded confidence.
“They really took it in stride,” she said. “They were ready to learn.”
At first she doubted why the new standards she’s required to apply to her teaching methods, the Common Core State Standards, put so much emphasis on nonfictional texts, like newspaper or magazine clips, but she found her pupils could tackle the complexity of the texts because the subjects actually sparked their interest.
And there was more. “They loved the discussion aspect,” she said. “Explaining not only in reading, but explaining how they figured out things in math.”
“All of these ideas that are coming through because of Common Core, I think they really embraced that,” she said, acknowledging the new standards were tougher and helped both her and her students to step up.
And Rose can be proud of her results. While less than one in three passed the third grade math test in 2013, more than two in three did in 2014.
This is the power of standards—a cornerstone of more than 30 years of continuous bids for reforming our nation’s public education. But can it be really that simple?
History
The idea that American public schools need to set a higher bar for themselves broke into the mainstream in 1983 with publication of the “Nation at Risk,” an education report commissioned by the Reagan administration.
Harnessing Cold War-style similes to national security, the report appealed for action: The SAT scores were dropping, one in eight 17-year-olds was “functionally illiterate,” and the rest of the world was running laps around the United States.
“We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament,” the report stated.
“We recommend that schools, colleges, and universities adopt more rigorous and measurable standards, and higher expectations for academic performance and student conduct, and that four-year colleges and universities raise their requirements for admission,” one of the recommendations states.
Even today, the report is often cited as a foundation of the current education reform with the term “reformist” being associated with a person advancing the types of changes the “Nation at Risk” recommended.
Needless to say, the report attracted criticism.
The drop in SAT scores was attributed to a larger number of students taking the test and scoring lower. Taking that into account, the scores were actually rising for many subgroups.
International comparisons based on standardized tests, problematic to begin with, actually showed the United States had rather good reading results, though mediocre in math.
While a public call for action was fueled by political campaigning, in academia multiple studies said the bar needed to be raised, but the crisis had been exaggerated. Yet, the critics never got much attention from mainstream media.
The next one in the Oval Office, George H. W. Bush, continued to follow the “Nation at Risk” template, while introducing another cog to the reform machine: National education goals. The idea was to use federal money to encourage states to pursue education goals set by Washington, D.C.
New York enthusiastically adopted the new standards. With two years of test results under its belt, it seems many schools previously doing moderately well have embraced the standards. Just like Rose’s P.S. 132, after the first year’s drastic drop in scores, the second year showed an optimistic uptick.
Unfortunately, such a scenario is hardly universal. Even though three out of four state schools improved their math scores over the past year, almost half the schools did worse than last year on the English test with many sinking into zero proficiency rates.
And so, even after 30 years, the reform remains open to many questions.
“Can standards be both ‘common’ and ‘high’? If they are truly high and rigorous, won’t a sizable proportion of students fail? Can a single set of standards make everyone college and career ready? How do we know? What does it mean to be ‘globally competitive’ with nations where educated people are paid a fraction of our own minimum wage?” asks education historian Diane Ravitch on her blog.
In the following parts of this series, we'll explore some of Ravitch’s questions and see if there are any answers.
