Goals 2000 is the most significant piece of education legislation we've had, but there are signs it's in trouble. The most obvious is the effort by some members of Congress to take back over 40 percent of its funding for this year. But the general confusion about what Goals 2000 means and how it will work may be a bigger problem.
Does it call for a federal takeover of the state and local responsibility for education? That's what parents and other community members are hearing. They're also hearing that Goals 2000 will force schools to adopt fuzzy, feel-good standards for promotion and graduation -- like some of the outcomes-based standards that have outraged so many people. This is nonsense, but a lot of it is going around, and it cuts off discussion about some real problems with Goals 2000.
So we are fortunate to have Diane Ravitch's new book, National Standards in American Education: A Citizen's Guide (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995). As the title indicates, Ravitch does not limit herself to Goals 2000. But she provides an essential perspective for understanding the legislation and what we have to do to make it work.
Ravitch puts the movement for standards squarely in the context of American education. As she points out, there is a paradox at the heart of our education system. We have many of the external signs of a coherent system. Schools all over the country have the same kind of school day and school year. Individual classrooms are set up in the same way. And the students read from the same texts and are taught by teachers who mostly use the same chalk and-talk methods.
But the uniformity of our system hides, as Ravitch says, the fact that we have no agreement about the "educational purposes" of our schools. Unlike the successful education systems of other industrialized democracies, we have not decided what math topics fourth graders should learn or what competency in writing to require of graduating seniors; we have no national consensus about what students are supposed to know and be able to do. And until the standards movement, we had no idea how we might try to create such a consensus.
One result of not knowing what our education system should produce is that we have difficulty fixing problems in the system -- or even diagnosing them. Ravitch speaks about how the "lack of clarity about the purpose of schooling leaves the educational enterprise vulnerable to transient trends as well as to interest groups .... In other words, we grab every new fad that presents itself as a cure-all -- like market schools, EAI-style privatization and charter schools. And equally disastrously, we bow to whatever group turns on the pressure. If we had clear and agreed-on academic standards, would we even consider the demands of full inclusionists that all children with disabilities be educated in regular classrooms regardless of the nature and severity of their disabilities?
All our students would benefit from a system with high and clearly defined academic standards, but, as Ravitch points out, it is especially important for poor children. In a system without standards, they often go to schools where little or nothing is expected of them. This is unacceptable, and in addition to being a way of raising student performance levels, Ravitch sees standards as a tool for achieving equity.
Ravitch misses one very important piece, without which standards will never work. I'm talking about stakes. Standards provide a way of connecting the entire education system. If you decide what kids should know and be able to do, you also know what must be in your curriculum and textbooks and tests and teacher education programs. But none of this will make any difference if there are no incentives for students -- if doing well in school is not connected with something kids want, like getting into college or getting a decent job. Systems in other countries recognize this. Ravitch does not. Neither does Goals 2000 -- and this is a serious failing.
Ravitch's comments on the position of colleges in the standards debate are also somewhat off the mark. She speaks about the importance of colleges' developing higher standards but fails to recognize that it is not in their interest to do so. They are in a bidding war for students, and schools that raise their standards risk losing students. Unless the government helps by insisting that students meet certain standards in order to qualify for government grants and loans, it will be hard for colleges to play the part they must in making higher K-12 standards stick.
As Ravitch points out, Goals 2000 is very much a work in progress. Its future -- and, indeed, the future of the movement for high education standards -- depends on the quality of the debate about Goals 2000. Her book is an important contribution to that debate.