Stephen Graff's Blog - Posts Tagged "standardization"

I'm a public school teacher in Southern New Jersey. I've been one for 17 years. In that time, I've seen drastic changes in pubic education that are not unique to New Jersey. Leave No Child Behind was ushered in during the Bush Administration and though it was a bi-partisan effort, members of both parties were critical of it. Success was scattershot, and its unstated major goal--pushing all American students to prove that they can master the exact same set of standards--has proven to be impossible. And for good reason: all children are different just like all adults. Public school funding for the programs and staff to teach to the test while completely avoiding it made American corporations like McGraw-Hill even richer because they ate at the trough, eating up the funding and spitting out useless textbooks to help students learn to pass useless tests. At the same time, schools and teachers were urged to differentiate in the classroom. No wonder so many educators complain of migraines. And the children? The stress of having to jump through the fiery hoops created by self-proclaimed education experts is now clearly evident in public schools all across this nation. Now that evidence is mounting that NCLB was a complete waste of time, new directions and flexibility have been offered/given to the states but the faulty scaffolding of the last decade and a half remains. If one of the goals was to stop the downward spiral of the United States--we continue to be outperformed by most other industrialized nations in sciences and math, which is a national security disaster--then the national focus on standardization has been a complete failure. We're long overdue for a wake up change. We need to realize that every student is unique, that standards are important but that teachers and schools have all the skills and resources to measure those standards on their own without sacrificing the essential goodness of what has always worked in the classroom.