She came at the invitation of the Parents Coalition for Literacy, and met with a group of us at Earlham on Tuesday morning. We will need to believe we can succeed, she said, and we will need to draw on the very best research about how students learn to read. She was a vital advocate for high standards and she was full of many interesting suggestions for how to teach students who are struggling to read. There is a danger in standards. If they are too specific or too prescriptive, they can have exactly the consequence that Tina Ferguson fears.
Bad standards can be a straightjacket that stifles good education.
That's why the debate over standards is so important for us all to be involved in. I believe high standards will help make us impatient with the same old same old frustrating experiences in the schools. I believe high standards will help us stop making excuses and stop underserving students. At the present time, we are failing to educate many too many students. For a certainty, high standards and high expectations will ask us to rethink how we teach.