ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050073
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
ANOTHER EDUCATION "summit" was held the other day, in New York. It was convened by business leaders and state governors trying to encourage faster movement toward higher academic standards.
The summit did produce a neat agreement. Governors vowed to implement tougher standards and performance measures within two years. Fifty top CEOs said they'd give preference in business expansion and relocation decisions to states that have set such standards.
Unfortunately, summits and calls to action and earnest reform proposals have come and gone before, and still primary and secondary education in America remains, on average, disappointingly mediocre. Says teachers union leader Albert Shanker: "Very few American pupils are performing anywhere near where they could be performing."
Higher academic standards, according to the chairman of IBM and the governor of Virginia and others, is the answer. They have some cause to say so. Where benchmarks are clear and widely used, as in the case of math and science in recent years, test scores have been inching up.
But anyone who believes that tougher standards in themselves offer redemption is dreaming.
For one thing, the educational status quo is powerful and resistant to change - from communities that don't send their kids to school ready to learn, to teacher unions intent on defending the right to be mediocre. For another, parents' involvement in their kids' development, especially at an early age, still trumps all other factors in academic achievement.
For a third thing, there are standards and there are standards. Explicit ones can prompt teaching for the test and regurgitating rote, which will hardly impart the critical-thinking skills IBM now desires. Vague standards can result in confused and corrupting exercises in bad thinking, which will hardly teach the values our polity needs.
Speaking of vague, consider the "Standards for the English Language Arts" proposed by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. As John Leo, writing in U.S. News & World Report, observes, they ask students to learn not reading but "word identification strategies;" not writing but "different writing process elements."
Through the obscuring gobbledygook, Leo discerns a theory of education derived from an academic philosophy in which all forms of expression, from whatever culture or medium, are equally valid texts to be judged only with reference to personal and social biases. It's a strange way to set standards, unless graduating deconstructionists is what education is about.
And yet, missing as much from the attempted setting of clear standards, as from their attempted undoing, is a sense of teaching's purpose. Most reform efforts have aimed at the what and the how of education, without sufficient regard to the reason for it - or sufficient appreciation that kids are smart. They pick up on purposelessness.
The point of education should be higher and more fundamental than even to spawn productive workers and political thinkers, as important as those missions are. If we are to love learning, then learning must be meaningful and wonderful in itself.
If we could get back to that basic - the core of human experience, too often cramped or squashed by parents and schools - surely we'd find both the performance and politics of education more amenable to improvement. Test scores would rise, but we could still hold occasional summits.
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