Borderland

It is no surprise that Gov. Palin wants to sit out the plan to write new national common core education standards. After all, she also wants to turn down $28.6 million in stimulus money for energy cost relief because taking it would require us to adopt energy-efficient building codes, which she says should be a local decision, and not “a dictate from the federal government.”

And now, due to a warp in time and space, Sarah Palin and I are in agreement:

“The standards are not the education problem we face,” the governor said. “The major challenges are persistently low achievement among some students and a low graduation rate. Now is the time for the state and school districts to work together to improve instruction and student achievement.”

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“The State of Alaska fully believes that schools must have high expectations of students,” Governor Palin said. “But high expectations are not always created by new, mandated federal standards written on paper. They are created in the home, the community and the classroom.”

Actually, while I’m glad to see the governor standing up for local control of education, her decision to merely monitor the national standards initiative is probably a bad idea from an administrative standpoint. There’s no cost going in, and it’s almost always a good idea to take a seat at the table when the rules are being written.

Alaska’s Commissioner of ED says that we’ve already put a lot of time and money into developing the standards we have now, and adopting new standards with new tests would put us back at square one, making it impossible to use all the test data we’ve already generated. Imagine that! Federal standards written on paper, bad; state standards written on paper, good. Reform talk runs off the rails quickly at every turn.

Susan Ohanian has a new essay review of a book on data-obsessed decision making called Accountability and the Slippery Language of Public Relations. She says:

Certainly language is a good place to start reform. We could start by admitting that the claims made for transparency are at best laughable and hypocritical and at worst deliberately deceptive. How can anybody claim data transparency when the test contents are kept secret? Florida, to name just one state, declares it a felony for a teacher to take a peek at the state test. People who declaim for data-based decision-making operate in a test question vacuum. They cannot speak for the adequacy of a test when people with intimate knowledge of the children being tested must remain blind to that test’s content.

Ohanian shares some examples of bad test questions, commenting, “No wonder they insist on keeping tests secret.” She points to research indicating that “The more you know about the subject of a test question, the more likely you are to get it wrong.” This research, she says, is “particularly attentive to the role of culture in shaping children’s understanding of what they read.”

Clay observes that Arne Duncan is nearly incoherent whenever he opens his mouth these days. Speaking at the National Press Club, he says, “This is not let a thousand flowers bloom,” and then in practically the same breath, “You have to give these charters real autonomy.” Normally, we’d hope that a guy with $100 billion to throw around would make more sense. But there are no standards for Education Secretary.

Teachers are in the business of letting a thousand flowers bloom, though, and sometimes that means stepping beyond the norm. Father Michael Oleksa, a Russian Orthodox priest with a long-term interest in Alaska’s Native communities and cross-cultural education, wrote that

For 100 years, Native Alaskans went to a school where their own language was forbidden, their history and culture benignly ignored or violently demeaned, denigrated, even persecuted. Teachers were given no orientation to the language or culture of their students or the communities in which they taught. The curriculum was the same course of studies as anywhere else in the U.S.

Oleksa believes that teachers need to understand their students and their communities well enough to help them find relevance in their education. “The village school,” he says, “remains an alien institution whose aim is the destruction of the community in which is operates. We systematically take bright, beautiful 5-year-olds and in 10 years transform them into angry, alienated, suicidal 15-year-olds.” This is a critically serious problem, and a standardized curriculum imposed by people who know nothing about the targeted student population only makes things worse. We need to find ways to include and celebrate local knowledge in the classroom.

This Inupiaq oral history project is a good example of making education relevant to the local community. Also, to illustrate just how different the life experiences of many Alaska Native students are, compared with the US mainstream, look at these videos about an Inupiaq hunting camp, posted in the Alaska Digital Archives.

Alaskans been working on curriculum for some time now. The standards push came along while we were getting our own grassroots education reform going, after over a century of federal control.