Archived: The Educational System in the United States: Case Study Findings

Teachers’ Attitudes Towards National Standards
Teachers’ attitudes towards voluntary standards such as the NCTM standards were
generally positive. Many teachers who were interviewed for this study said that
they worked to incorporate NCTM standards into their curriculum or knew that
the textbooks they were using incorporated NCTM standards. This was true of
teachers at all levels—elementary, middle school, and high school. However, there
were noticeable differences in teacher responses between schools of different
achievement levels. In schools where the majority of the student population strug-
gled to meet state-assessed achievement standards, the role of NCTM standards
was often a subject for debate. In the case of Parks Elementary School, parents
who were actively involved in-school management were pushing teachers to
incorporate NCTM standards in their curriculum. However, teachers resented the
parent council pushing for change, seeing it as a vote of no confidence in their
current teaching practices. An internal document at Parks Elementary School
spoke of the need for more communication in order for NCTM standards to be
successfully adopted: ‘‘Design Team members are the emissaries for the initia-
tive—they need to work not only on promoting discussion about the objectives,
but also promoting enthusiasm for the process so we can overcome the resistance
that naturally comes from change.’’
At South Central, the high school with the lower-achieving students, teachers said
that standards of any kind were barely relevant, since they were faced with teach-
ing students who came into their school seriously below grade level. Much of the
instruction at South Central was remedial in nature. Rather than debating the mer-
its of national standards, teachers and administrators were more concerned with
finding ways to ‘‘catch’’ students in the hopes of educating them, meeting the
minimal state standards, and ensuring students’ figurative and literal survival
through the 12th grade and graduation. An exception to the resentment expressed
toward national standards at these two low-achieving schools in Metro City was
found among the principals and teachers at Metropolitan School. Teachers inter-
viewed at Metropolitan, also a low-achieving school, generally supported the no-
tion of national standards in math and science. One teacher remembered that
when she had begun teaching 25 years earlier, she was not given any standards

---

24
with which to work. She contrasted that experience with her current situation,
which offers more assistance in the form of guides to help organize teachers and
schools, the state assessment test, a curriculum based on state goals, and text-
books which adhere to those goals.
A principal at Midtown Elementary school had mixed feelings about the reality of
national standards: ‘‘I support national standards as a way of getting away from
discrimination or allowing educators to make excuses because ‘my kid’s this or
that’. Standards would spell out what children have to learn. But what would hap-
pen to kids who don’t make it? Keep failing them until they meet the standards?
Who will pay for the extra programs to help these kids? Funding from the federal
government is a joke; state aid is shrinking.’’
Although teachers at Rockefeller Elementary do not use textbooks extensively,
their math curriculum is based on NCTM standards. In fact, one teacher we spoke
with served as a member of the math study group, which redrafted the K–8 math
curriculum over the summer. She said that the motivation to redraft the math cur-
riculum came from ‘‘dissatisfaction with state standards and Rockefeller’s own
past standards and the desire to align the curriculum with current national stand-
ards in math.’’ The consensus view was that, if the school was meeting the NCTM
standards, then state standards would also be met.
Similarly at Central Middle School, a teacher we spoke with had worked with an-
other Central colleague to rewrite the math curriculum in order to update it with
NCTM standards and to put ‘‘more meat into it.’’ She reported that there is now
a lot of emphasis on problem solving, algebra, and practical problems related to
real-life situations, and estimating. She characterized the old way of teaching math
as boring, saying the kids found it ‘‘a snooze couple of years’’ and that the ‘‘kids
are eating up’’ the new curriculum.
Members of the math department at Hamilton High School also stated that they
used the NCTM standards to guide their courses. Both the department (teachers)
and the school administration agreed on the need to incorporate these standards
into the curriculum. One of their first goals was to have more statistics taught in
math courses. A summer project resulted in 200 pages of ideas about how statis-
tics could be used in different courses.