“David, your mom is so cool.”
This was high praise coming from a group of teen-aged tennis players. I was flattered.
Were they impressed with my serve? My backhand? My style? Nope. I had simply brought pizza to their end-of-the-season banquet, easily winning the teens' respect.
I must confess, though, I am a fraud. Pizza was merely the choice of a desperate woman -— a woman who learned that she must come up with a main dish for 70 in exactly 45 minutes. (It turns out my son volleys a tennis ball better than he handles organizational details which created some pretty typical parents' problems.)
I figured take-out pizza might save the day and save my reputation, I sneaked it past the casserole-toting moms at the door.
Among the athletes, though, pizza met all the standards for fine dining. It went over so well, in fact, that for one crazy moment, I thought about bringing pizza to my family reunion the next month. I wisely reconsidered though, after imagining the reaction of my mother’s relatives, to whom good home cooking rates somewhere next to godliness.
Public Education Issues Complicate Definition of Standards
Which just goes to show you how hard it is to pin down what makes something “good.” The job is even harder when it comes to setting standards for what students know and can do when they leave school. Although most of us want our kids to attend schools that set “high standards,” it’s harder for us all to agree on what those standards should be.
We want our kids to read well, know how to solve problems and have a working knowledge of our nation’s history. Even better, we’d like our students to perform on tests at least as well, if not better, than students from other nations.
But how do we define “good” reading? Is it enough to just recognize words on a page? Or should all graduates be able to compare complex informational texts and write essays about them?
Standards Might Encourage Teaching Character, Developing Work Ethic
And are academic standards all we want? Employers need people who show up on time, every day, willing to work hard and skilled in new technologies. How will we write standards for these skills? And how will we measure progress?
And how about the qualities that make our children better people? Things like compassion, integrity and faith. People with these can change the world -— how will we build and measure those?
Setting Standards and Finding Strategies are Major Education Issues
These questions can only be answered with a lot of discussion. And the answers my community finds will be different from those defined by yours. That’s okay, because kids are all so different and the world needs many kinds of players to make it work.
One thing is certain, though: If you care about what and how your children learn, your voice is important in the debate. You will be able to ask meaningful questions about your child’s learning only when expectations are clear. And it will be much easier to convince children to work hard in school when the adults in their lives all agree on the goals and the best way to reach them.
Helping schools establish standards, and finding good ways to meet them, is harder than running a bake sale. But it’s the only way to be sure schools reflect your values.
If your school isn’t interested in defining standards or aligning curriculum to match, it may be time to find one that does.
The good news is, in a growing buffet of choices, there is a school out there whose goals and values match yours. Don’t give up until you find it.
Linda Wacyk is a former EduGuide Editor.