A Progressive Case for Educational Standardization

How not to respond to the Spellings report.

By Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

In the responses from higher education to the 2006 report of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education, one particular argument is made over and over again: that educational standardization of the sort implicitly called for in the report is neither possible nor desirable. According to this argument, the standardization entailed by the report’s recommendations would destroy what makes American colleges and universities so great: their diversity, which can never be reduced to a common standard or measure of educational effectiveness. This, we think, is the wrong way to respond to the Spellings report and other similar critiques of higher education. Although the “s” word has become virtually synonymous among academics with pedagogical sterility, we want to make a progressive case for educational standardization by pointing out its unappreciated democratic potential.

The Spellings Approach

The Spellings report takes American higher education to task for what it describes as “a remarkable absence of accountability mechanisms” to ensure that colleges help educate as broad a spectrum of students as possible. Specifically, it charges that the nation’s colleges and universities have not done enough to align college and high school literacy instruction, leaving many high school students unprepared to go on to college. In addition, the report charges, many students who do go on to college never complete their degrees, partly because college tuition is so expensive, and partly because, in the commission’s words, “most colleges and universities don’t accept responsibility for making sure that those they admit actually succeed.” Furthermore, the report complains, “there are disturbing signs that many students who do earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing, and thinking skills” required by today’s competitive global knowledge economy and that “the consequences of these problems are most severe for students from low-income families and for racial and ethnic minorities.”

The solution proposed by the report is essentially to increase the free-market competition between colleges, heightening the competitive incentives presumably now lagging on campuses to improve the quality of undergraduate education while simultaneously cutting costs. To this end, the report proposes that common standards be established for college-level work and that college students be tested to determine how much they are learning. Without such common standards and tests, the report insists, it is difficult for high schools to prepare their students for college and for students, parents, and taxpayers to compare the quality of education offered by one institution with that of another. Such consumers will be able to assess the return on their investment only if they have a reliable measure of how well different institutions are preparing students for today’s marketplace.

Challenges to the Report

Several aspects of the report have drawn legitimate opposition from higher education. It is legitimate to fear that the tests the report proposes for higher education would resemble the intellectually dubious tests that now dominate American schools under the No Child Left Behind Act. It is also legitimate to fear that the report represents what Douglas C. Bennett, president of Earlham College, has called an attempt “to improve higher education on the cheap,” that test results would be used to further defund already financially straitened colleges, that the common standards the report calls for would be applied in draconian ways without faculty consent, and that these standards would be developed by corporate managers and public officials with little knowledge of academic culture. Finally, it is legitimate, in our view, to be concerned about the free-market ideology underlying the report and the report’s narrowly vocational vision of higher education.

But opposing the report on the grounds that American colleges are too diverse to be judged by any common standard strikes us as fundamentally misguided. Over and over, Spellings’s critics insist that any attempt to apply such a common standard to colleges will inevitably result in a “one-size-fits-all” straightjacket that will destroy what is most distinctive about our institutions and the heterogeneous student populations that they serve. Thus in its response to the report, the AAUP complains that the commission seems oblivious to the harm that its “call for standardization . . . would inflict on the diverse missions of our colleges and universities.” In another response to the report, Ronald Crutcher, the president of Wheaton College of Massachusetts, asserts that “it would be an enormous mistake to measure each institution by the same yardstick,” since “research universities, community colleges, public institutions, and private liberal arts colleges have different missions and serve different populations.” President Bennett of Earlham complains that the commission comes dangerously close to implying that a one-size-fits-all measure should be used: “The diversity of our institutions’ missions and [of] our students calls for a diversity of measures—not some Washington-imposed single test.”

Along similar lines, John Churchill, the secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, insists that the report’s “demand for common measurement” threatens what has been the strength of American higher education, its “diversity” and “decentralization.” And Jill Beck, the president of Lawrence University, argues that we should resist “‘one-size-fits-all’ test instruments,” since “a fundamental strength of higher education is its remarkable institutional diversity.” The commission’s “misguided benchmarks,” Beck continues, “have the effect of trying to homogenize American higher education.”

Good Standardization Demystifies

We see four major problems with this anti-standardization position. First, the wholesale rejection of common standards fails to distinguish between good and bad forms of standardization. The standardized tests that characterize No Child Left Behind (following a long history of assembly-line approaches to schooling) have given standardization such a bad name that it has become too easy to reject standardization as such through a sort of guilt by association. As long as we equate all standardization with invidious, No Child Left Behind–style testing or the McDonaldization of American culture, we ignore the existence of other forms of standardization—environmental, health, and safety standards, to mention only a few obvious examples—that most of us readily accept or insist on. Indeed, some degree of standardization is essential not just for a good society, but for one that is accessible as well. How would you like it if, every time you used a computer, you had to learn an entirely new program or adjust to an entirely different keyboard configuration?

Second, the blanket rejection of educational standardization is undemocratic. To say that academic competence can’t be judged by any standardized measure mystifies such competence by turning it into a matter of taste or whim—an ineffable je ne sais quoi mysteriously possessed by a minority of superior talents rather than a set of practices that can be identified, modeled, and made generally accessible. It’s a short step from telling the Spellings Commission, “Sorry, but we colleges are just too diverse to be measured by any common standard,” to telling students, “Sorry, but the basic skills that you need to succeed in college are just too complex and heterogeneous to be explained to you clearly.”

Third, attacks on educational standardization simply mirror and reinforce American education’s disconnected, fragmented status quo. American colleges today can indeed be proud of their impressive intellectual and disciplinary diversity. What is far less impressive, however, is their record in helping students negotiate that diversity by providing them with the skills needed to make sense of it. Given the discontinuities of the educational system (discontinuities that standardization would help counteract), students have no assurance that what they learn in one grade level, institution, discipline, or course will be recognized, rewarded, and built on in the next. A minority of high achievers manages to see through the curricular disconnection to detect the fundamental critical-thinking skills that underlie effective academic work in any course or discipline. The majority of students, however, have to resort to the familiar tactic of giving each successive instructor whatever he or she seems to want and then doing that again with the next instructor and the next. For these students, giving instructors whatever they want—assuming students can figure out what that is—replaces cumulative socialization into academic ways of thinking and writing. College thus becomes a series of disciplines and courses, each tending to present a different picture of what academic work looks like but few having the overarching status that a curriculum with greater standardization of basic intellectual practices would confer.

Last and most important, it is simply not true, as the antistandardization argument has it, that colleges are so diverse that they share no common standards. Just because two people, for example, don’t share an interest in baseball or cooking, it does not follow that they don’t have other things in common—or that, just because several colleges have different types of faculties or serve different student populations, they can share no common pedagogical goals. A marketing instructor at a community college, a biblical studies instructor at a church-affiliated college, and a feminist literature instructor at an Ivy League research university would presumably differ radically in their disciplinary expertise, their intellectual outlooks, and the students they teach, but it would be surprising if there were not a great deal of common ground in what they regard as acceptable college-level work. At the end of the day, these instructors would probably agree—or should agree—that college-educated students, regardless of their background or major, should be critical thinkers, meaning that, at a minimum, they should be able to read a college-level text, offer a pertinent summary of its central claim, and make a relevant response, whether by agreeing with it, complicating its claims, or offering a critique. Furthermore, though these instructors might expect students at different institutions to carry out these skills with varying degrees of sophistication, they would still probably agree that any institution that persisted in graduating large numbers of students deficient in these basic critical-thinking skills should be asked to figure out how to do its job better.

Spellings’s critics, however, argue that such agreement is illusory. Thus in his response to the report, Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, argues that though educators may seem to agree on the importance of critical thinking as a standard for college-level work, the term is used to mean so many different things that its usefulness as a standard is undermined. As Shulman puts it, “common educational goals like ‘critical thinking’ . . . are often invoked for quite different achievements. . . . No single set of measures can do justice to all those variations.” Like Spellings’s other critics mentioned above, Shulman demands that colleges be free to take “many different approaches to higher education” rather than being forced to converge “on the ‘one best system.’”

But we need go no further than Shulman’s own prose—or that of other Spellings critics—for an example of the critical-thinking skills whose commonality he denies. Even as Shulman claims that the concept of critical thinking is hopelessly diffuse, his writing, like that of Spellings’s other critics, shows that it involves such basic moves as identifying and accurately summarizing views to which one wants to respond; selecting, framing, and explaining quotations; exploring claims and explaining their implications; making connections to similar or related claims; offering a cogent argument of one’s own; moving between one’s own argument and the view to which one is responding without confusing readers; citing evidence and showing how it supports one’s own argument and not competing ones; and anticipating and answering counterarguments.

These fundamentals—whose ubiquity in the intellectual world Shulman denies—are precisely those that most students fail to learn. And in our view, students will go on failing to learn these fundamentals unless they are standardized across all domains and levels—that is, are represented with enough redundancy, consistency, and transparency that students can recognize them as fundamentals rather than as one set of arbitrary preferences competing for their attention among many.

Conclusion

In sum, then, there has to be a better way to respond to the Spellings report than to reject the idea of common standards. Instead of defensively insisting on our irreducible diversity, we in higher education should be opening up debates on campuses across the country over whether there are common practices that underlie that diversity. If a consensus emerges that there are, as with good leadership we think it will, we should then work collectively—with the full participation of college faculties—to identify and standardize those practices so that students can more readily master them. Engaging in this standardization process is important, we think, not just because without it No Child Left Behind–style versions of standardization may be imposed on us unwillingly, but because intelligent standardization is critical to our mission of democratic education, which entails being as explicit as possible about the key moves of academic and public-sphere literacy and helping as many students as we can to master them. In our view, higher education does need common standards, even if the Spellings Commission says it does.

Gerald Graff is president of the Modern Language Association and author of Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. He and Cathy Birkenstein are authors of “They Say/I Say”: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing and directors of the Writing in the Disciplines Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

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