What's at Stake in the K-12 Standards Wars: A Primer for Policy Makers.(Brief Article)

What's at Stake in the K-12 Standards Wars: A Primer for Policy Makers, edited by Sandra Stotsky. New York, Peter Lang, 2000, 369 pp., $32.95 paperback.

This book by several hands has been overseen by Dr. Sandra Stotsky of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Deputy Commissioner for Academic Affairs of the Massachusetts Department of Education. She must be one of the most independent-minded scholars in any education school or state department of education. Under her able editorship, this book scrutinizes the scholarship, slogans, and work products of those very institutions, and it is not destined to please most of their incumbents.

The authors of the book are distinguished scholars and scientists who are not affiliated by profession with K-12 education. Wayne Bishop, David Klein, Ralph Raimi, and Hung-Hsi Wu are professors of mathematics. Paul Clopton is a research statistician. Thomas Carnelli and Jeanne Smoot are professors of English, Robert Costrell is a professor of economics, Mary Campbell Gallagher is a linguist, Chris Patterson a public policy analyst, Sheldon Stern a historian, Alan Cromer a professor of physics, Paul Gross, Michael McKeown, and Stan Metzenberg are professors of biology. They combine a high level of intellectual rigor with a commitment to the improvement of public education. They are true "public intellectuals," volunteering their energies and their probing scholarship to help that cause.

The thirteen chapters are focused on state and national content standards and tests, and on various nationally sponsored reform efforts, especially by the National Science Foundation. In general these scholars find that the standards, the tests, and the national programs are ill-thought-out, ineffective, needlessly infected with ideology, and based on spurious research. Officials charged with improving educational standards in more than forty states and in national organizations and agencies should read this important and carefully documented book. So should concerned citizens. It is written in a clear style, and is sometimes, as in the delightful piece on mathematics by Professor Raimi, spiced with pungent wit.

Professor Metzenberg's contribution, which focuses on the national science standards created by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy," may stand as an index to the quality of the whole collection. Observing that the AAAS standards are vague and unhelpful, with much space devoted to "hands-on" pedagogy and "real world" understanding--buzzwords in progressive-education rhetoric--Dr. Metzenberg undertook to examine the research cited to undergird the "Benchmarks." His effort reminded me of an admonition I received from a great scholar early on in my graduate school days: "Always check the footnotes."

What Metzenberg found was: (1) Half of the work cited did not consist of peer-reviewed studies. (2) Of the peer-reviewed articles, none offered clear support for the positions taken by the "Benchmarks," and most were inferior science that would not have been accepted in a peer-reviewed journal of high quality. Several researchers, for instance, claimed that "traditional" science teaching leads to "scientific misconceptions." Yet Metzenberg found that these writers not only misrepresented and misinterpreted the children's responses, but possessed scientific misconceptions themselves. In one study, ten students were asked to discuss the cooling of a hot piece of metal, and the researchers reported:

 
   Some students appeared to be unaware that every cooling process requires an 
   interaction partner. It appears that they held the idea that bodies may 
   cool spontaneously without other (colder) bodies being involved.