Insofar as standards can provide educators with  structure around which to build their curriculum, there can be some good. As an educator, I am more frustrated by the minutia of grade-level benchmarks and detailed criteria- not to mention standardized testing.

My double major is Art and Social Studies. Without textbooks or hard district guidelines, I’ve used the J.Paul Getty Institute’s recommended standards or Discipline Based Art Education (DBAE) to help me develop units that have been tremendously flexible and differentiated. Since I cover Art History, Aesthetics/Design concepts, Art Production and Art Criticism, I feel like I’ve been able to help a wider variety of students succeed in my classes besides just those who come to me already skilled in realistic depiction through drawing.

I’ve managed to migrate to the National Art Education Association’s new national standards pretty easily since they include expression and reflection, although I’ve been frustrated with some of their emphasis on curation. 

In Middle School Civics, I’ve enjoyed trying to use the many of the newer Social Studies standards to help my students migrate to document-based and inquiry-based/question-driven lessons and away from traditional chapter-notes and vocabulary when our administration chose not to purchase new textbooks. 

This Spring, my administration told me I had to give up Civics and begin teaching STEAM. I have a couple of problems with that that relate to standards. One is that one reason for the change is that they’re eliminating Iowa History as a separate class since all of the new Social Standards are supposed to be incorporated into all of the Social Studies classes.  Why continue to teach separate Geography, American History and CIvics classes then? Why not switch to Sixth, Seventh and Eighth grade general Social Studies classes?

Needless to say, the other, more personal issue, is that while I laud the pretense of integrating Art into STEM, I have no training in Science, Math or Engineering and very little in Technology. I ASKED what the expectations, standards, guidelines or curriculum were going to be and was told vaguely to try to incorporate the 21st Century Skills. Which I do anyway in my Art classes, but I feel as if I’m being set up to fail. I wonder if this is how many of our students feel in many of their cases. Losing a class I’d taught for twelve years and was finally feeling good about making more creative, relevant and differentiated was enough of a blow to my personal and professional morale. I’d like to think I can better empathize with students taking classes they don’t want to take.

Returning to the original questions; For years our district had such an intense emphasis on standardized testing that it consumed all of our professional development time. Practice testing-drill lessons or mini-units were mandated. We were pressured to re-write our assessments so that they were modeled after standardized test formats. Our students actually complained that everything we did was for the school’s test results, not for their learning or their interests.

If anything good came of that orientation, it was that teachers frequently analyzed student test scores and discussed possible strategies for helping classes in their weaker areas.

I spoke out for years that we needed professional development that addressed the affective domain, not just the cognitive one. Mainly because we need to learn ways to inspire student intrinsic motivation to learn- curiosity. If nothing else, to motivate them to take the standardized tests seriously, because otherwise the results are constantly skewed because so many students deliberately sabotage their tests while several others just avoid taking them.

Unfortunately, I think that when we try to address relevance as well as or instead of rigor, we still try to do it in an industrial-age, systematic model. We have a few examples from my own district.

In an effort to permit students the opportunity to have more flexibility in their schedules, so that they can take more FFA classes as well as Construction, Wood shop, and Computer Aided Drafting, we went to a nine period day. As a result, teachers have a greater workload, while students have less class time to complete assignments or tests each period. We already share the shop teacher, send students to a neighboring school for the Construction classes. There was a rumor that we had to eliminate our Family/Consumer Science teacher to be able to afford the new FFA instructor, although community members had set up a foundation to help fund the Ag program, so that may have been just a rumor.

As a result of shifting our emphasis from preparing students for college to a more STEM/career focus, we also shifted to trying to improve our Math and Science scores instead of our reading and composition scores. As a result, we eliminated our silent-sustained reading time. Another consequence is that while teachers aren’t combing through test scores during professional development time, that means that we aren’t discussing in groups strategies for helping those students who are slipping through the cracks. Meanwhile, we still dedicate half days all week three times a year to standardized testing, but teachers no longer review data from the tests.

Finally, while I appreciate that we’re finally spending so much time learning about student trauma, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS), it feels like we’re not doing it to understand or care for students, or to find ways to inspire their intrinsic motivation to learn. Instead it seems like it’s just about behavioral management and (sorry if this sound’s cynical) once again, encouraging student conformity. Even while adults on the PBIS committee members, and a handful of students on Student Council or the one or two student representatives on that PBIS committee are challenged to use their imaginations and creativity to find new ways to get the rest of the student body to obey rules.