Coronavirus School Closures Will Force Us to Examine Failure of Standards-Based School Accountability
How will students make up the work they are missing now that schools are closed during the coronavirus pandemic? I am dismayed by some of what I’m reading about people’s strategies for catching kids up once schools open. There are people who actually believe that standards-based, accountability-driven education ought to be happening even while schools are closed and that it ought to be intensified once the schools reopen.
This kind of thinking is silly right now because, as Education Week reports, “Every single state has won permission to skip the statewide standardized tests that are required by federal law…. As of March 31, the U.S. Department of Education had granted waivers to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Bureau of Indian Education.”
Standards-based accountability has defined and organized public schools across America for two decades under the policies of the No Child Left Behind Act, although political support for standards and assessments had been growing for a decade before that. In a devastating critique of standards-based education published in 2000, Will Standards Save Public Education?, progressive educator, Deborah Meier identifies six assumptions that form the foundation of standards-based school reform:
“Goals: It is possible and desirable to agree on a single definition of what constitutes a well-educated eighteen-year-old and demand that every school be held to the same definition…
“Authority: The task of defining ‘well-educated’ is best left to experts—educators, political officials, leaders from industry and the major academic disciplines—operating within a system of checks and balances…
“Assessment: With a single definition in place, it will be possible to measure and compare individuals and schools across communities—local, state, national, international. To this end, curricular norms for specific ages and grades should be CONTINUE READING: Coronavirus School Closures Will Force Us to Examine Failure of Standards-Based School Accountability | janresseger