Comment

Commenting upon the paper by Chester E. Finn Jr. and Marci Kanstoroom is difficult because it is ambivalent about its own goals. In some aspects, the paper is a polemic and does not pretend to dispassionate analysis. All nuance must be lost, for example, when the authors rank states' standards and accountability systems with grades of A through F and find some states on the honor roll while others are irresponsible or only going through the motions. The paper also includes a balanced discussion of many contradictions and shortcomings of the standards movement, but disconnected from its condemnations of other critics who make essentially similar points. The most jarring aspect of the paper is a condemnation of the standards movement's opponents, followed by acknowledgment that these opponents' criticisms are, in large measure, correct. And examination of the grades Finn and Kanstoroom give to state standards reveals that many of those states getting high grades are guilty of policy distortions that the authors rightly condemn, but that are not accounted for in the calculation of grades and rankings.

Finn and Kanstoroom properly trace the contemporary standards movement to ideas of systemic reform that led to the Charlottesville, Virginia, education summit's adoption of six national education goals in 1989. But the authors err when they describe systemic reform as a tripod of linked standards, assessment, and accountability. There was a fourth leg.

Marshall Smith and Jennifer O'Day, who coined the term systemic reform, were clear in their writings that adequate resources were also an essential part. Smith and O'Day's particular concern was that school improvement could result in middle-class children learning new, higher-order thinking skills while poor children, with more poorly trained teachers, inadequate facilities, laboratories, and instructional materials, and less access to challenging courses, would be judged solely on how they performed on multiple-choice assessments of basic skills. Truly raising standards, Smith and O'Day feared, would simply cause more disadvantaged children to fail. They termed the fourth leg, a guarantee of fully qualified teachers and other quality resources, "opportunity to learn."³⁹

In negotiations with the Bush administration for the 1989 summit, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton represented the Democratic governors. Accompanied at these meetings by Marshall Smith, Clinton urged that opportunity to learn standards be included in the new program.⁴⁰ He proposed, for example, a national commitment to reduce the proportion of low birth weight infants to 5 percent.⁴¹ But the Bush administration resisted, fearing this would open the door to big federal expenditure obligations for preschool, child health, and compensatory education programs. Clinton backed down. The agreement released by President George Bush and the governors set a goal of all children entering school ready to learn, but specified no new programs to achieve it. "We understand the limits imposed on new spending by the Federal deficit," the president and governors agreed. "However," they added, "we urge that priority for any further funding increases be given to prepare young children to succeed in school."⁴²

Despite a failure to fund it, however, getting all children ready to learn, with an adequate menu of health care and early childhood education, was one of the six national education goals that led to the contemporary standards movement. The subsequent suppression of discussion of this goal, in both the Bush and Clinton administrations, has predictably led to many of the conflicts around standards that exist today and that the authors properly term a "backlash." The original conception of higher standards had a carrot-and-stick philosophy. But the contemporary standards movement, and particularly the wing of it represented by Finn and Kanstoroom, wants a stick to do the entire job. Thus, in their rankings of states, no mention is made of whether children are prepared to achieve high standards, but only of whether the bar is set high enough. Fear of sanctions alone is deemed sufficient to raise standards.

Thus, when Finn and Kanstoroom say that in the contemporary...