Standards are collections of actions that are undertaken by organizations to ensure they are aligned with the actions that should be taken by similar organizations. Many who work in information technology in the United Stated are familiar with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which defines the Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) to help organizations manage and reduce cybersecurity risks. In education, there are organizations that define curriculum standards. These define the actions that educators should take to ensure what they are teaching is aligned with the accepted curriculum.
While I maintain curriculum, including that defined by standards, is largely artificial, the issue “what should we teach?” must be answered by educators. These decisions are made locally; typically, a school district will employee a curriculum coordinator whose job is to document curriculum decisions, facilitate decisions-making about what is the appropriate curriculum, manage curriculum resources, and help communicate those decisions. In other jurisdictions, curriculum decisions are made through larger organizations, and it is more prescribed, and decisions are made that limit educators’ choices to what they teach. Regardless of the origins of local curriculum decisions, most are informed by curriculum standards. These documents are typically created by professional organizations and define the lessons that should be learned at specific grade levels in specific content areas.
One of the first widely applied collections of standards was the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) which began publishing “standards” in the later 1990’s. In the decades since, the number of organizations publishing standards has increased to the point where teachers cannot reasonably expect to teach all of them. Since about 2010, the Common Core State Standards have been widely (although not universally adopted) across the United States. Exactly what is meant by “adopted by” varies.
In general, adoption means the state’s educational agency has mandated schools to administer the tests they specify, and the test publisher claims it is aligned with the standards. The degree to which students are judged to have “met the standard” is almost always measured with tests; While the reliability and validity of the tests and data are dubious, students take far more tests than previous generations of students did; those tests are often administered via web-based interfaces. Among the questions that have been raised about standards and the tests intended to measure them are:
- Do the standards accurately reflect what students should learn? Curriculum standards are documents that result from organizational practices. Reviewing those documents and updating the contents can be the result of long processes. Groups are convened, they review existing documents, assess the appropriateness of them, make and review changes, then produce the final versions of new documents. Once new standards have been approved by the agency to make them, they must be deployed. These delays can make standard-based curriculum appear to be obsolete.
- Do the tests accurately measure what they claim? The tests used to measure the degree to which students have achieved the standards are written and administered by publishers who were awarded contracts by departments of education in states, they are propriety, so independent review of them cannot be undertaken to verify the validity and reliability of them. While this may seem a minor point, as it can be reasoned, “it is educators’ job to ensure students score well,” that argument suggests performance on the test is a reliable measure of learning, which is dubious.
- Do the tests predict “success?” Tests are administered for many purposes. They can be gateway activities which must be passed to engage in activities; licensing tests are an example of these tests. They can be used to measure past performance. When these tests are done, no additional measurements are made; many tests in schools are this type, and we understand their limitations by looking at the exam for a course you have completed and feeling completely lost. The final purpose of tests is to predict future success. Ostensibly, this is a primary purpose of standards-based tests. “Career and college ready” have been a mantra of standards-based curriculum and testing, but that is a poorly defined construct and there is limited evidence that those who pass the test are successful in their careers or in college.