This past summer the legislature in my home state of North Carolina passed into law the so-called "Excellent Schools Act." While this legislation will certainly affect the lives of students and teachers here, the significance of what has been enacted goes well beyond the borders of North Carolina. In many ways the legislation reflects and crystallizes much of the thinking as well as the public discourse on education in this country at this time. Certainly the act is of a piece with the White House's current push to mandate national tests to measure educational standards in our public schools. The North Carolina legislation included the following items:

* Increased attention to state-mandated performance standards throughout K-12 schooling.

* Incentives for teachers and schools to achieve these standards; for teachers who exceed them in the classroom by 10 percent or more there are bonuses of $ 1500: for schools that meet their goals teachers would receive $ 750.

* Teachers in schools where students are doing poorly in the classroom will have to take a general knowledge test (if they do not pass it they get two more chances before losing their jobs).

* Local boards of education are able to decide whether a teacher should get tenure after four years in the classroom. In addition there is a "streamlining" of the appeals process for removing teachers, primarily through limiting the appeals process.

* Related legislation has also placed a Damocles sword over the heads of school principals who fail to ensure high or rising scores on achievement tests; failure to do so leads to the possibility of suspension or removal from their position.

The bill was originally proposed by Democratic governor Jim Hunt, considered one of the national leaders in public school reform. It was supported by both Democrats and Republicans in the state. Harold Brubaker, Republican Speaker of the House, summed up support in these words; "for the first time ever we are holding educators to the kind of accountability and performance measures people in the private sector are faced with on a daily basis."

In return for these changes teachers were promised a 6.5 percent increase in salaries and a long-term commitment by the governor to raise the pay of North Carolina teachers at least up to the national average (the state like most in the South has languished in standards of pay). The key concern at the center of the proposed changes, however, is the effort to ensure that public schools more fully reflect and conform to the needs of business, and that the criteria used to judge business success or effectiveness are more completely and consistently employed in public education. No one has expressed this more often and more persuasively than President Clinton, who has argued that the most important reason for school reform is the "need to be competitive in the 21st century." As the language of "performance goals" more and more dominates the public debate on schooling so the business concern with output and productivity comes to define our vision for school success. At school, as in the workplace, success is understood only in the most immediate and crude terms of empirically verifiable and quantifiable data, especially as schools become focused on tests that measure student performance in ways that are standardized and intellectually reductionist. As Alfie Kohn has noted, "The emphasis [at school and work] is on results, on turning out a product, on quantifying improvements on a fixed series of measures such as sales volume or return on investment." We have entered an era where, to an unparalleled degree, the language and thinking of business shape the thinking and vision of education.

Of course one does not need to be a genius to grasp the detrimental effect of all this on the lives of teachers and students. Under the regime of increasing standardization, schooling becomes simply the search for prefigured "right" answers, and the capacity to regurgitate bits of information that are on somebody else's list of what is intellectually correct or appropriate. Worst of all is the notion that only those things that can be measured in some kind of precise and quantifiable way have educational value. The arts or other creative areas of the curriculum which do not easily lend themselves to this "regime of measurement" are bound to lose out and be marginalized (or try to transform themselves into some grotesque form of measurable competencies which is now commonly the case).

Where teachers' livelihoods are made dependent on improvements in test scores, it will be only the most exceptional among them that will seek to make their classrooms places that are creative and expansive in their practices. Focusing on what is most shallow and homogenized in teaching negates those learning possibilities that emphasize the development of a critical intelligence, the stimulation of our imagination, or the quest to make meaning out of our own experience. All of these depend on cultivating attitudes that question so-called correct answers or knowledge and to seek, instead, what is unfamiliar, even irreverent or subversive. Real education encourages students in the search for the unpredictable or the unexpected. It helps us transcend the "givenness" or the taken-for-granted in our intellectual or cultural world.

Critical observers of schooling in this country have long noted how public schools have been shaped by industrial images-classrooms as factories, students as raw materials, teachers as workers, the pedagogic process as one of inputs and outputs subject to behavioral and technical manipulation. Today, under the pressures of both the White House and the state house, the concern to fit schools to such a vision has rarely seemed so apparent. And rarely have more "progressive" visions of education seemed so marginalized. This pressure has been fomented by the sense of panic about falling school standards that has suffused the public discourse on education since the publication of the 1983 "Nation at Risk" report. Hardly a day seems to go by without the publication of yet another report claiming that test scores in math, science, or reading have dropped, or that other countries continue to outscore the U.S. in measures of school achievement. It seems not to matter that careful scholars like Gerald Bracey or David Berliner have refuted the veracity of many of these claims. They have shown, for example, that invidious comparisons with SAT scores makes no sense when it is recognized how much more socially diverse is the present population of SAT test takers compared to the limited and disproportionately privileged groups taking it in earlier times. Nor does this country do especially badly in comparison to most other nations. Perhaps most significant is how little correlation there is between these measures and levels of economic growth or productivity. It is paradoxical indeed that while schools were blamed for the economic plight of the 1970s, the present economic boom is little credited to education.

Part of what is so debilitating about the North Carolina reforms and their counterparts elsewhere is the reduction of teacher's work to the crudest kinds of monetary incentives. Of course this is not about the reasonableness and justice of teachers being paid a little better. There has always been a great hypocrisy in the language we use to describe the value of those who help raise our children and how much society is prepared to pay those who do such work. No, the problem is the notion that better teaching can be paid off like piecework; count up the test results and give bonuses to the most effective workers. This vulgar notion that good teaching is reducible to higher scores on the test is surely the most limited of ways to think about the nature and purpose of teaching. The pressure to convert the breadth and complexity of children's development to the crude simplicity of a numerical score is a trivializing and insensitive travesty apparent to most teachers who understand just how little is captured by this about human intelligence, creativity, or sociability.

Finally, we are talking about a process that further accentuates the competitive culture of schools. In this regard critics of schooling have long rejected the claim that schools are ideologically or morally neutral institutions. They have, especially, noted the centrality of individualist and competitive values in what is sometimes referred to as the "hidden curriculum" of education. Schools in this view are a primary mechanism for inculcating the necessity and inevitability of a success-oriented, achievement-centered, hierarchical and egoistic culture. Schools provide the vehicle for sorting, and legitimating, what will ultimately become the class and other social divisions of American society - giving an intellectual rationale for how we allocate and distribute material and symbolic rewards. Within this context standardized tests are of enormous consequence. They provide a common-sense legitimacy to notions about the unequal distribution of intellectual capabilities. They offer a "scientific" justification for the hierarchical and unequal relationships between human beings. The ubiquitous "bell-curve" upon which an individual's success and failure is plotted gives an apparent naturalness and inevitability to the social and cultural divisions of our world. And certainly to the extent that they are attended to with increased concern, even alarm, they reinforce the culture's obsession with winning, "getting ahead," and the pursuit of individual success.

Whether they like it or not, in the present climate teachers and school administrators are forced to give inordinate attention to those things that differentiate and rank students, rather than concern themselves with developing an ethic of care and mutuality. From my own experience in working with teachers, this emphasis is at least an uncomfortable one. Many teachers are animated by a moral impulse to bring young people to a greater appreciation of the social relations of care, compassion and mutual concern. The intense emphasis on standardized testing which now permeates our schools, however, promotes the opposite feelings; the culture of individual success always implies doing better than one's neighbor - sometimes at any cost. Whether or not we wish to acknowledge it, this is a process that encourages students to lie, cheat, or do "whatever is necessary" in order to do well. The self-interested ethic of the marketplace becomes the ethic of the classroom. It is a short distance from this to what Charles Derber has called the culture of "wilding" - a culture whose driving force is an unbridled concern with increasing one's own share of the pie.

Especially damaging in all of this is the pernicious myth of meritocracy. How we perform on these standardized tests is, we are to believe, a matter of individual ability and intelligence and the level of effort particular students can bring to bear on the task. Absent or silent in this view are the effects of the social context on how students relate to, or achieve, in school. Yet there is absolutely no doubt that school success is, in reality, overwhelmingly influenced by this context. We have known for many years that the single most important predictor of school achievement is one's social class. One only has to look at the numbers put out by the Educational Testing Service related to SAT performance:

Annual                        SAT

Family Income                scores



Under $ 10,000                  873

10,000-20,000                  948

20,000-30,000                  962

30,000-40,000                  993

40,000-50,000                 1015

50,000-60,000                 1033

60,000-70,000                 1048

70,000-80,000                 1062

80,000-100,000                1090

over 100,000                  1130



Sociologists, socio-linguists and others have given us a significant understanding of why this is so. Though complex, it is a process that brings together the differential expectations of teachers, the attitudes of students towards the institution of school, the cultural and linguistic knowledge that students bring with them from home and the streets, as well as the educational and economic resources available in the community. Far from an innocent vehicle for impartially discerning merit among students, it turns out that schools are deeply implicated in the cultural and material inequities of class, race, gender and region; who does well in school and who does badly is much better explained by the social circumstances within which our kids grow up than by whether their teachers are especially talented or even hard-working. In this sense North Carolina's intention to punish teachers where students do poorly, or to make them take a general knowledge test, is laughable were it not so insulting and threatening to teachers. The most realistic way to avoid such consequences is for teachers to find jobs in the upscale suburbs or neighborhoods of our cities.

Of course one may well ask why it is that such knowledge is excluded from the framing of the public debate - and legislation - on education. There is no easy response to this question. Certainly, however, part of the answer lies in our culture's deeply-rooted attempt to deny the existence or salience of social class in the shaping of our lives and experience. Instead we have a latter-day myth of "rugged individualism" - the notion that each person's success or failure is entirely explained by their own talents and efforts. In the face of the overwhelming reality that school success is more dependent on a child's social class than on any other single factor, placing the onus on the efforts of the individual teacher or student is a massive exercise in cultural denial and ideological confusion.

Particularly sad in the distortion of educational values and goals implicit in recent reforms is their effect on teachers' motivations and aspirations. The idealistic intentions that usually bring people into education - a desire to make some contribution to a better world, to improve the lives of kids, to offer a caring environment for children, and so on - become perverted by the limited pursuit of higher test scores and the crass exploitation of a few extra dollars for achieving "better" results. What sense of vocation can teachers be expected to bring to their work in a climate that stresses such crude, reductionist and narrowly-defined educational goals? Like so many other areas, teaching has become not only a de-skilled craft but also a degraded one.

It is certainly paradoxical that at a time when there is so much talk about improving the professional quality of public school teaching, reforms increasingly limit and circumscribe the work of teachers. While on the one hand there seems to be an effort to decentralize power in school systems - so that greater decision-making possibilities exist at the local school level and among teachers themselves, the increasing centrality of standardized tests in guiding the curriculum means that the real power over pedagogy remains far removed from the actual work of teachers. Teachers, in effect, can have more say over less and less things that really matter in the educational process. Some of the most acute observers of the public school scene have noted for several years now that teachers are treated more and more as impersonal instruments in a bureaucratic process than as thoughtful and creative intellectuals whose personal vision of education really matters. Their concern with meaning and imagination becomes irrelevant as teaching is controlled by external test results and text-books, instructional materials,or software which manage the teaching process and curriculum content - all of which attempt to produce, in the words of Michael Apple, "teacher-proof" classrooms!

More insidious than these, however, are attempts, such as those in the North Carolina law, to weaken the tenure, job security and appeal rights of teachers. While ostensibly making it easier to "weed-out" poor teachers, such changes in the professional security of teachers will undermine the confidence of those who might wish to break from the "daily grind" of test-driven classrooms to create more daring and challenging environments for their students. This country has a long history (some of which is vividly reconstructed in recent Hollywood movies) of the authoritarian exclusion of such teachers. As local school boards increasingly have the power to terminate teachers' contracts, right-wing activists will have greater opportunities to eradicate from the schools teachers who provide any kind of a liberal or dissenting view of culture or history in America. It would be politically naive in this context to expect anything less. One only has to look at the continuing battles around matters of curriculum, textbooks, and literature, issues of sexuality and so on, to understand how attempts to weaken tenure laws can only increase the threat to teachers who are committed to classrooms where students might encounter ideas and beliefs that contradict traditional or more conventional worldviews. More conformity in classroom instruction rather than more compelling, interesting, or provocative teaching is the certain consequence of such changes.

We have come to understand from our recent studies of culture and literature that it is often the silences in our discourse - what is not said - that tell us what we truly value. While a steady public drumbeat calls us to connect education with competition and individual success, schooling seems ever more remote from what John Dewey called "the making of a world" that is democratic. One looks in vain in the discourse of teaching "excellence" for a concern with education as a potentially powerful vehicle for the renewal of a culture of active and meaningful citizenship; one in which education has a principal role in nurturing the skills, values, and commitments necessary to a culture in which individuals care about, and participate in, the making of a society that is just, compassionate, and free. For our schools to serve such democratic ends, rather than act as the training sites for the techno-corporate world, would mean a transformation in both our vision of educational purpose and in the practices of the classroom. When schools become places concerned with the meaning of citizenship and democracy rather than test scores and success, the educational agenda comes to be about matters of self and social awareness and the care for life. Schools are understood, preeminently, as places where students learn to critically examine the institutions, beliefs, values, and behaviors that constitute our world so that they understand the ways we promote or impede a world that treats human beings with dignity and respect. Students are encouraged to become critically conscious individuals able, as the great Brazilian educator Paolo Freire described it, to "problematize" our world - to question what is familiar or taken-for-granted in how we as human beings, both individually and collectively, understand and act toward others.

The impulse for such a concern is an ethical one. It is the quest for a world that is more just, more compassionate, more loving, more democratic, more free. It is the struggle for a world in which unnecessary suffering is reduced and joyful existence expanded. In this sense the critical citizenship we seek in our schools relies on the nurturing of an ethical sensibility that reveres life, that seeks a world of dignity and caring, and sanctifies creation. While often marginalized, a powerful and rich educational tradition speaks, both philosophically as well as practically, to this notion of education for critical citizenship. It articulates a view of education that is inseparable from the quest for a renewal of the American values of democracy and community. It insists that literacy today must be a critical literacy that teaches students to understand the underlying moral and ideological meanings that permeate our cultural "texts," from books to movies, from fashions to popular music. It is an education that is about nurturing the sense of social responsibility, developing an awareness and respect for our differences as human beings, and the capacity to engage in the determination of our shared future. It means an education that teaches us, above all else, to care about the fate of human beings and of the earth itself - a concern for unnecessary poverty and violence, for racism and prejudice, for the destructive and wasteful uses of our material resources, and for the inviolable sanctity of life. Such a language and vision offers a significantly different agenda for educational reform than the present, corporate-driven approach to our schools. More than anything it reminds us of the significance of the public nature of these institutions as sites for the potential renewal of that sense of mutuality, community and human agency in the seeking of a more just and compassionate commonwealth.

While the juggernaut of testing and competition continues its relentless shaping of our schools we can hear the rumblings of alternative educational discourses and agendas. Parents continue to tell pollsters the importance they attach to their children's schools being caring environments. The "Character Education" initiative promoted by the Clinton administration and various professional groups has promoted the importance of civic values in kids' education - though in ways that seem to emphasize moral conformity and the acceptance of authority rather than the feisty anti-authoritarianism required of a democratic culture. Religious and communal groups struggle with how to address issues of sexuality in schools, though typically here in ways that emphasize its dangers and evils rather than its pleasures. And in pedagogy itself educators try to promote some degree of creativity and meaningfulness in student learning by promoting a more integrated approach to the curriculum, or by emphasizing a "constructivist" approach to knowledge where the process of understanding rather than simply getting the answer right is paramount.

Yet all of this offers little to an educational vision which truly foregrounds the struggle for an education that prepares human beings to grapple with the transformation and repair of our world. There is little here that helps us break out of the deadly language of "excellence," "basic skills," "competencies," and "standards" that has dominated the goals of education in the last two decades. Such a change will mean that we see education as, in the first place, inextricably connected to the social, moral, and spiritual vision of our nation and our world. In this sense education is never morally or ideologically neutral. It can only be about maintaining and reproducing the world as it is, or about challenging and changing it. Notwithstanding the present hype about peace and prosperity, our world continues to be a place filled with the unnecessary suffering of violence and wars, poverty, meaningless work or unemployment, intolerance and racism, dangerous concentrations of political and economic power, the despoliation of the planet, civic withdrawal and isolation, and the dehumanizing commodification of everyday life. In such a context any education that does not define its purpose, preeminently, as the quest for lives of greater moral and spiritual meaning, and communities more caring, just, and democratic, is, surely, irresponsibly misdirected or dangerously distracted.

Svi Shapiro is professor in the Social Foundations of Education at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His most recent book, with David E Purpel, is Beyond Liberation and Excellence (Greenwood 1995).

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