Many countries that excel at education do so by establishing nationally set, clear standards for students that are rigorous and consistent across classrooms. But the United States has long had a system of educational reform based on local incentives and rewards that leads to wildly varying student performance standards, with the result that national averages are lower than they should be.
This pattern of reforms is not only incoherent, it’s destructive. The most recent examples of standards-based reforms — like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (renamed IDEA in 1990) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2002) — aimed to fix this problem by making teachers accountable for student learning gains. The premise was that when you hold schools and teachers accountable for results, they will figure out how to improve.
The problem with this strategy is that it relies on a set of assumptions about human behavior and teaching that are both naive and counterproductive: namely, that if you demand that teachers work harder, make their curriculum more prescriptive, and then hold them accountable for standardized test scores, they will learn how to improve their students’ achievement.
What’s more, it ignores the profound influence that culture and values play in a teacher’s ability to make a difference in her students’ lives. If we don’t acknowledge these realities, and engage teachers and policymakers in a more sophisticated discussion of how to manage expectations for both teachers and students, it is likely that the “tight-loose” approach to school improvement will remain confined to policy talk.
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