An Open Letter to Federal and State Legislators:

Over the last decade, for all practical purposes, youve taken over American education. Convinced, as you apparently are, that education professionals lack standards, and dont want to be held accountable, this is understandable.

In your new role, there are several things you should keep in mind.

First, youve taken on an awesome responsibility. The future of about 53,000,000 students is now primarily in your hands. As adults, theyll sit in judgment on your decisions.

Second, the human brain is the most complicated thing known. That its capabilities and potential can be measured by the machine-scorable tests your policies mandate is a cruel myth.

Third, your power and influence in support of education are essential. But as Soviet-style central planning surely demonstrated, "top down" change strategies are rarely effective. Reform is tough under the best of circumstance. In education, with its myriad layers of management between you and students, "top down reform" is probably an oxymoron

Fourth, youre blaming teachers and students for educations ills. When you scapegoat, not only are you unfair, you close your mind to other, even very obvious, explanations of poor performance.

Fifth, youre assuming that market forceschoice and competition, reward and punishmentcan work the magic in schools they sometimes exhibit in the marketplace. A few days spent in a real classroom would show you that, for both teachers and students, the satisfaction of doing something worth doing, and doing it well, motivates far more effectively, for far longer, than promises of money or the shame of publication of test scores and school rankings.

Finally, you need to know about a problem which, because of its centrality, must be addressed before any other reforms can possibly make much difference

Educating is about whats taught and learnedthe curriculum. Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind freeze in place a curriculum designed in the late 19th Century for different people, facing different problems. In the name of "accountability," youre forcing teachers and students to do the wrong thing better.

In 1984, John I. Goodlad and a team of researchers completed a massive study of American schools involving 27,000 individuals. Summing up his findings in the book, A Place Called School, Prospects for the Future, he wrote "The division into subjects and periods encourages a segmented rather than an integrated view of knowledge. Consequently, what students are asked to relate to in schooling becomes increasingly cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect."

Your own educations were no doubt of the "subjects and periods" sort, prompting you to think that a fragmented approach to knowledge is acceptable. Reflecting that assumption, youve demanded "standards"not standards describing the kinds of people students should be and become, but standards for each school subject.

Schools are in the knowledge business. Knowledge is "all of a piece." Humans learn seamlessly. But the thousands of state standards youve caused to be written ignore this fact. Those who wrote them for various school subjects obviously didnt talk to each other, much less recognize and take advantage of the mutually supportive nature of knowledge. The result is perpetuation of a "mile wide and inch deep" curriculum, a curriculum acceptable not because it makes sense, but because its familiarity has caused us to stop thinking about it. For evidence of its superficiality, consider how little most adults can recall of what they once "learned" at great state expense.

When, in the 1980s, the direction of K-12 education began to be set by leaders of business and industry rather than by professional educators, fresh thinking about whats taught stopped. For example, a promising approach to the study of history, science, language arts and other subjects, based on World War II-spawned general systems theory, was emerging. You've made its further development pointless because standardized tests cant measure the quality of the complex mental processes involved in systems thinking. The initiative has been abandoned.

Your "reform" legislation ignores the integrated nature of knowledge, reflects a simplistic view of how students learn, imposes measures of accountability which emphasize minimum standards rather than maximum performance, and slam the door on innovation.

Left in place, that legislation will bring not merely educational but societal disaster. Revisit the No Child Left Behind legislation. And this time, talk to educators.
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