It's the standards, stupid!

A news story came out this week about the Cape Henlopen and Indian River school districts' plan to distribute iPads to incoming freshmen students for use in their math classes this year, because they are required to improve their math scores.

When the Department of Education (or any other educational organization and/or agency) says that the students of a certain public school are not meeting standards, people generally look for a group to blame.

"It's the teachers!" some say. "They're not doing an adequate job of teaching the material!"

Others blame the students. "Kids these days! They're lazy and they don't work hard enough!"

Then a small minority (usually people who don't have children of their own) chimes in and blames parents for not bringing up their kids properly.

Yet all of these blame-slingers miss the point. There is another group to consider, which plays a far more active role in the education of our children than teachers, parents, or even the students themselves: the bureaucrats who establish the standards.

At the state and federal levels, educational standards are set by unelected bureaucrats (they are usually appointed by whoever happens to be in control of the government), whose authority over education trumps even that of school board members, who are elected officials and therefore answer to the people of their respective communities.

In spite of this, whenever conversation turns to students not meeting standards, only rarely does anyone think to question the wisdom and motives of those who set the standards in the first place.

An example from recent history is the Delaware Student Testing Program. An extraordinary amount of time, money, and energy went into ensuring that students passed the high-stakes state-mandated test, and if students failed, those involved acted as though, somehow, the school district and/or teachers weren't measuring up. The problem in that case, of course, was that the DSTP was pure rubbish, designed by meddling busybodies who believed that they knew more about what children should learn than did local school districts (a belief which has yet to be justified).

State-level interference in the classroom was bad enough, but we now have federal bureaucrats in Washington who are setting standards for schools across the nation. It is not unreasonable to consider that, far from being a problem, students' inability to meet politicized standards might be a good thing!

In the future, when a particular school district is being critized for failing to measure up to state or federal educational standards, hold off on criticizing the teachers, students, and parents of that district, and ask, "Are the standards any good in the first place? Who is establishing them and why? And does it really matter if the district doesn't meet standards set by unelected bureaucrats in Dover or Washington?"