Robert MacNamara's whiz kids in the Pentagon set standards, counted bodies and just knew we had to be winning. Vietnamese peasants counted their dead grandmother or little sister and made serious plans to fight us indefinitely. Officials tell us if we adopt content standards and count test results things will get better. But classroom teachers face a thousand frustrations that are a consequence of these same officials neglecting the issues that began this monograph. The standards style of management is fundamentally wrong-headed.
Standards set at the top, have little or no lasting effect.
Because teachers caring about what they do is considered either unimportant or taken for granted. Yet teachers must feel valued, be eager to work and excited about what they do for good things to happen in the classroom. Any approach that fails to focus on this will not improve schooling. Achievement and people are synonymous. Instead of recognizing and acting on this, however, public officials ignore problems they should be addressing while piously admonishing teachers to meet standards they usually had no say in setting.