Can standards be humanizing? Part 1: Standards in my background

They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 75

State standards. National standards. High standards. Content-specific stanards. 21st century standards. Anchor standards. Grade-level standards. Got a problem in education? There’s a standard for that.

Despite the central role that standards have played in education reform conversations over the past two decades that I’ve been an educator, standards—or, more accurately, the ways that certain schools implement standards—have been a constant source of tension and demoralization in my teaching life. I suppose that’s the way things go in the whack-a-mole of education and life: every solution creates another problem.

Since beginning work in the district work I currently live and where my kids go to school, I’ve been continually struggling with and confused about the ways teachers are asked to use standards in their planning and in standards-referenced grading and reporting systems. It seems that many of my stumbling blocks, questions, disconnects, and dissonnances lead back to a narrow and rigid approach to stanards. How educators plan instruction, respond to student work, and report grades has become one of my central struggles between standardization and humanization in education. And for me, so many things about the way that educational standards are implemented, assessed, and reported has become, as Freire said, “irreconcilable” with my firm belief in the power of education as a humanizing force in students’ lives.

This three-part series began as an early morning I-can’t-turn-off-my-brain-so-I’ll-just-get-up-and-write post that I drafted in the first few days of my work in a new position, and it has evolved throughout the year as I’ve learned more about my colleagues’ history and relationship with educational standards. In this post, Part I: Standards in my background, I explore my roots with educational standards and how they played a role in the early years of my teaching experience. In Part II: Creating an educational compass, I write about how, in my second decade of teaching and scholarship, I solidified my educational philosophy with standards in a peripheral role. And finally in Part III: Navigating a standards storm, I reflect on my efforts to sustain and follow that compass while working in a district where a rigid view of standards is often the primary an influence on a teacher, department, or school’s approach to curriculum and assessment.

My goal in this series is to better understand the place of standards in my own educational history so that I’m more prepared to support teachers in developing their own educational compasses and the role that standards play in their educational wayfinding. As an instructional coach and a graduate instructor for practicing teachers, this question of “Can standards be humanizing?” is the question that drives my thinking journey.

The language of teaching and learning: Before standards

As I began the school year in my sixth new school building and fifth school district, I found myself thinking about how each district and school creates their own language and culture through which reality is interpreted and created and experienced. Or even earlier, the language and culture of my preservice teaching program at the University of Iowa was where it all began. At that time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Iowa was one of few states that deferred to local control and did not have state standards, so I honestly don’t remember learning or thinking about educational standards as a preservice teacher.

I vaguely remember learning about the 1996 NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts, but in my memory, they feel more like a touchpoint document of common commitments, rather than a list to be unpacked and transformed directly into learning targets and assessments. They were helpful guides of what professionals in our field value, but I don’t remember spending much (or any?) time parsing the language or making them a central part of my early unit plans in methods classes. If anyone has an old floppy disk reader, I could look back at my college assignments and lesson plans to check for more specifics, but otherwise, I remember them as one of many pieces that informed the teaching plans I created for practice, in practicums, and in student teaching.

When I read Shane Safir’s descriptions of her teaching origins in Chapter 5 of Street Data: A Next-Generation Model fot Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation, I felt similarly grateful that I experienced teaching before standards-mania. Safir says,

“I was lucky to become a teacher in 1997, before the test-and-punish era dawned and stripped so many educators of a sense of agency and possibility. I was lucky to have professors in my teacher preprartion who pushed me to define my pedagogical philosophy—to say what I believed about teaching and learning and stand firmly in those beliefs” (p. 98).

Shane Safir, Street Data, 2021

Like Safir, I miss those days, and I was pushed to craft my initial teaching philosophy after widely reading and discussing educational theory and research. In a conversation with a first-year teacher recently, I said, “Oh, I bet you’ve been asked over and over what your educational philsophy is, right?” And she responded, “Not really. Maybe in my first semester of education courses, but after that it was pretty much about the standards and how to teach them.”

What? That was a recent touchpoint that reminded me how much language of teaching and learning has changed since my preservice teaching days.

Standards in the (privileged) background

My first teaching job was as a mid-year replacement in a New York City public middle school, and there was a definite “teach to the test” mentality that was, no doubt, driven by the educational standards machine in its infancy. However, as a newly certified teacher working in a school that also hired many uncertified teachers, I was considered overqualified to merit an official mentor teacher, so I started at the beginning of second semester directly after student teaching without any real orientation to NYCPS philosophies or standards. I taught a Saturday school workshop on test prep that was centered around isolated reading skills (think, “This week is “making inferences” and next week is “identifying the main idea”), and I remember many days with special schedules to accomodate round after round of practice testing.

After my partial year in NYC under a principal who regularly threatened both teachers and students and a colleague who told me that “the only way to control a child is to humiliate him,” I took a job in a suburban school in Fairfield County, CT. I was disappointed to teach outside the Bronx, where I lived at the time, but I needed a job in a more supportive environment and all the city schools I applied to said they wouldn’t have their staffing plans figured out until July. So it was off to the suburbs, where my new students’ mothers were extras in the 2004 Stepford Wives movie.

The language that patterend our conversations in the Connecticut high school where I worked from 2003-2007 was centered on our department-created and assessed writing portfolios, the ritual and community of small groups focused on looking at student work using the Tuning Protocol, and professional development we chose to attend at Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. If we had a language and a culture that guided our realities, it was the language of the colleagues we worked with, the students we taught, and the vision for education we were creating in our school community, in consultation with experts in our field and our own professional experiences.

State standards existed in Connecticut at the time, and we did align our curriculum to that work, but they were not the language that determined our daily conversations with students. I recognize that our freedom from intense test-prep and standards pressure was a function of our district’s affluent, largely White population of students for whom the standards and standardized tests are designed. This wasn’t a reality for all Connecticut students, particularly those in urban areas who certainly did experience more “teach-to-the-test” learning experiences. I remember hearing teachers from Hartford talk about excessive test prep and narrow assessments tailored to the Connecticut state tests, much like I had experienced in NYC.

Any teach-to-the-test approach is limiting at best, but I still do believe, that the standardized test that existed in Connecticut at the time, the Connecticut Academic Performance Test, was a better test for reading than the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills that I grew up with—and its decendents that I returned to when I returned to my home state. CAPT tests for reading and language arts consisted of reading a story and writing four brief essay responses, rather than the standard read a passage + answer 5-6 multiple choice questions that remain common on today’s Iowa Statewide Assessments of Student Progress.

Thanks to our district’s well-resourced schools and families, a decent (or at least not horrific) standardized test, I walked into a school where test scores were already high enough to relieve both teachers and students from the pressures that often lead to narrow approaches to standards, curriculum, and assessments. Instead, I came of age as a teacher supported by experienced colleagues who had had the luxury of developing their own professional compass with a variety of influences: the CAPT test and Connecticut standards were the required scaffolds that they acknowledged, but most importantly, I grew up on a healthy diet of rich conversations about student work, “Reader as Writer” workshops at Bard College, a weekend workshop with Peter Elbow, and freewheeling department meetings and lunches where we shared books, stories, and poems that we wanted to teach and ideas for new ways to engage our students.

I move to Iowa & Iowa moves toward standards

The broad educational compass I developed as a young teacher in Connecticut transferred well to Iowa when I moved in 2007—at first. At that point, Iowa had only recently begun the path to developing state standards, with full implementation taking effect in 2008, just after I arrived in the state. When I started teaching in Iowa, my colleagues had just worked on the Iowa Core Standards and were aligning them with the existing courses. At that point, alignment largely meant creating a big spreadsheet that showed which courses addressed which standards, sometimes with more detail about which units or assessments particular groups of standards lived in. That big spreadsheet lived in the background, and beyond revisiting it periodically during the summer or sometimes during department meetings, it was more of a reference point than a daily guide.

In my first two years there, we also worked together to revamp our curriculum and create new conceptually-driven courses (for example, I taught “Culture Clash” and “Gender’s Game” instead of “World Literature” and “Experiences in Writing”). Just as we were rolling those courses out in the 2009-2010 school year, the Common Core Standards were announced, and our realignment began. There was learning, new language, and shifting, to be sure, but the spreadsheets, the alignment documents, the apparatus still lived behind the scenes, and our focus was still on creating conceptually rich courses with diverse texts and authentic reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing experiences. Tellingly, we created a “Cheat Sheet” that summarized our common assessments. It took about 2.5 pages to cover all our 10-12th grade classes.

I wrote briefly about this transition in a chapter for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Reading Perspectives and Practices (2020) that I co-wrote with Amanda Haertling Thein and Kelli Rushek about how the standards have been narrowed by the Revised Publisher’s Criteria (2012) and subsequent curriculum materials. For my colleagues in that Iowa school, it was about reflecting our current courses and previous work, examining the new standards, and looking for areas of both strength and growth. We tweaked accordingly, but we kept up with the conceptually-based courses and approaches that we had committmed to, and we used the CCSS to enrich rather than restrict our practices.

In those early days of CCSS alignment in that department, there was surely more “loose” than “tight” between to teachers’ approaches to a given course. We were just beginning the days of common assessments and scoring processes, and differences between teachers’ approaches and their students work were being revealed as we looked at student work. We used common scoring to become tighter on the essentials, but we still taught different texts and were able to create our own assessments or riffs on common assessments, as long as we could still assess the same core skills. And though standards had become a larger part of our regular educational language, they were not the only thing we talked about, and we continued to organized courses and units conceptually to focus on ideas as the entry point for learning, rather than discrete skills or educational objectives.

Part 1 recap: 2000-2010, a decade of balance and autonomy

Overall, my first decade as an educator was marked by balance and autonomy. As a preservice educator, I was encouraged to read and think broadly, and as a young teacher, I had considerable autonomy over the texts I taught, the assignments I created, and how I crafted a language of literacy with my students. Standards played a larger role in my teaching in 2010 than they did in my teacher preparation in 2000, but I was always able to keep conceptual thinking and the humanity of stories as central tenets of my teaching. Asking questions and considering multiple perspectives had always been central to my teaching —in fact, I actually wrote in my syllabus that those were the two skills that would lead students most assuredly toward an “A” if that was their goal—and that never changed.

Coming back to Freire’s quote that I began with: In my first decade, I felt human as a teacher, and I felt I was about to support my students in using literacy to “become fully human.” Yes, there were structure and constraints that I chafed against at times—five paragraph essays, thesis statement formulas, and the ever-present standardized tests. But overall, my colleagues and I were largely able to keep these things in their place: as supports toward authentic learning.

In Part 2, I’ll turn to my second decade of teaching and learning, and I’ll consider how my thinking about standards became more explicit in my work as a school librarian, my involvement with the American Association of School Librarians’ Standards Implementation Task Force, and my doctoral studies at the University of Iowa.