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.

We Should Escape the Babble of K-16 Standards, If We Can

Michael Kirst blogging at College Puzzle has an insightful post (Mar. 12) on the lack of alignment between (1) K-12 standards and tests and (2) college admissions and placement tests.

Kirst points out that the two testing systems only overlap in Advanced Placement courses. He says that:

[Forty-nine] states (all but Iowa) set K-12 standards and assessments...without talking with higher education institutions and state boards for higher education....

Higher education, Kirst says, pays attention to "the upward trajectory of pupils" -- for example, an admissions test’s capacity "to predict student performance in the first year of college."

The K-12 systems pay attention to high school graduation and meeting annual state and federal growth goals.

In the past, Kirst has pointed out that a lack of alignment between K-12 standards-and-testing and college admissions deprives the K-12 accountability system of support from a civicly-engaged constituency: the parents of college-bound children. In this post, he points out that the lack of alignment leads to college students having to take remediation course on subject matter that they should have learned in high school.

Kirst points out that university officials say that K–12 tests "have not been evaluated to see how well they predict freshman grades." But he says "such evaluations are not difficult to conduct."

I would be interested in hearing good reasons why we can't have grades (advanced, proficient, basic, below basic, and the like) on K-12 tests aligned to college admissions and placement levels and why we can't have admissions achievement tests aligned to placement levels . The existing "babble of standards," as Kirst terms it, sends unclear signals to students (particularly, Kirst notes, those from low-SES families).