Sandy Kress Raises Questions about National Standards

Austin attorney Sandy Kress was President George W. Bush's principal adviser on drafting the No Child Left Behind law and, earlier, was the chief architect of Texas's school accountability system. (Prior to that he had a long history at the highest levels of the Texas Democratic Party.)

Kress recently (June 5) commented on eduwonk on the current fascination with national academic-content standards.

He speculates that governors, chief state school officers, and others are under the spell of utopian "good feelings" about national standards that do not yet exist.

But once the good feelings "wear off," Kress says, they will start asking questions. Writing national standards will stir up perennial controversies: whole language vs. phonics, computation vs. concepts. Then, Kress points out, come all the questions of detail "that arise once you get below the level of 30,000 feet."

At this point, Kress says, policymakers may get to the place where they find out the new national standards under consideration are not ideal, not perfect, indeed no better than (or even possibly worse than) the standards that the states already have.

Kress asks reasonable questions about the horse-trading and interest-group jockeying that will inevitably arise:

Could it be that the tradeoffs that happen nationally will be the same as those that occur in the states? Could the same interest groups intervene? Could this nice dream [of national standards] be interrupted by the demons that bedevil state standard-setting? Could these interests be the problem as much as variation [among state standards documents]?

Then Kress brings up the centrally important issue of a nationally uniform grading policy (technically known as "performance standards"):

If we ever get to detailed, precise [national academic-content] standards in each grade for reading and math, do the participants agree to common performance standards? If they don’t, who’s kidding whom? The real problem today is not so much that some states have vastly higher [content] standards than other states; it’s more that their performance standards are greatly different.... [W]ill the states, commit to making those the same? If not, [the national standard-setting process] will be utterly fruitless.

Although Kress did not make this point in this eduwonk comment, he and those he works with have often pointed out that revising academic-content standards can be a time-consuming excuse for not doing the hard work of fixing failing schools and closing the achievement gap.

For example, the Washington Post reported on June 1 that immediate-past U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has voiced a cautionary note on this matter. Spellings said in a recent interview that she supports a process of states working together from the bottom-up to raise academic standards. But she is concerned that the strenuous effort required to create new national standards could divert attention from students who are failing right now:

We have a speedometer, and it says we're going too slow. Should we get a more precise speedometer? Sure. But the most important thing is speeding up.

More Musings about NAEP

Guest post by Ze'ev Wurman

Yesterday’s release of the long-term NAEP results has been already written about here, here, and here. For 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds the news is good. Significant increases since 1999, and particularly since 2004, in both reading in math. Most gratifying is the jump in reading achievement for 13- and 17-year-olds -- age groups that have been resistant to change for almost three decades.

Another piece of good news is the fact that much of the growth, in both reading and math, was concentrated in the lower achieving students, at the 50^th percentile and below. The ethnic achievement gap was either reduced in the early years or did not change because all groups kept advancing—a rising tide lifts all boats. And some of the reduction has been nothing but spectacular, as noted by Sandy Kress in his comments on Bill McKenzie's Dallas Morning News blog post. So far so good. Enhanced accountability -- whether through the standards movement of the 1990s or through NCLB in the last decade -- is finally paying off.

Much journalistic coverage has concentrated on the fact that our 17-year-olds are still essentially stuck in place, barely returning to their achievement level during the 1970s. Other coverage has pointed out that despite students taking more impressive-sounding courses, perhaps the reality is grade inflation or course-name inflation. But there is a larger question we should ask ourselves. Why should we even expect NAEP results to rise much? After all, if our education level was rather high in early 1970s when NAEP started, why should it get much better? For the 17-year-olds, there was an achievement dip in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so clearly we should be able to reclaim the 1971-73 level. But we have achieved this level in the 2008 results. Why should we expect to do notably better in the future?

One could answer that since we are doing better with our 9- and 13-year-olds, we can also expect more of 17- year-olds. Yet one could argue that the increases in the earlier grades have come not because they know more in absolute terms, but simply because now we teach material earlier, material that 30 years ago was delayed to later grades. Think of it—we push algebra to earlier grades, we expose kids earlier to a variety of cultures and facts through TV and the Internet, so they broaden their vocabulary earlier—it may be only natural that their skills look better at a fixed age. But the question still is how easily we can educate our HS graduates to a significantly higher level than in the past. Could it be that the immovability of achievement for out 17-year-olds represents some cultural constant or barrier that is hard to break, and not simply the failure of high school? It would be interesting to compare how other nations have fared with their 17-year-olds over time, but the data is hard to come by. For example, the last year of high school was sampled by the 1995 TIMSS, and it found that the best countries achieved only about 50 points above the international average, while the best countries' elementary and middle school students achieved 100-130 points over the international average. That would be consistent with the existence of some 'natural' constant that is hard to break. Makes me wonder.

[Ze'ev Wurman was a senior policy adviser in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, 2007-2009. He also serves on the panel that reviews mathematics test-items for the California standards-based tests, and he was a member of the California State mathematics curriculum-framework committee.]