Standards for Instructional Supervision

Enhancing Teaching and Learning

Steven Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000082968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The standards in this book will enhance teaching and learning. The list of the book's contributors reads like a "Who's Who" in the field of instructional supervision. These standards are practical, specific, and flexible, so that schools and districts can adapt them to their own contexts and goals. Each set also includes activities for professional development.

Part I

Introduction

1

Toward Standards for Instructional Supervision: A Genealogy of Standards

Henry St. Maurice and Perry Cook

In this chapter, we ask where standards come from and whether their provenance offers a means of analyzing prospects for the development and promulgation of new standards in the field of instructional supervision. Our method of inquiry is genealogy, as described by Foucault (1980):

Let us give the term “genealogy” to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories, which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today. (p. 83)

Briefly, a genealogical method combines analyses of scholarly texts with analyses of local and tacit knowledge to show contradictions and discontinuities, and points of struggle over how official discourses and practices are constituted, and by whom.

The aim of this method is to show how words and ideas have changed and how they can change. As Fendler (1999) said, “The purpose of genealogical critique is to render events and circumstances historically contingent, and therefore changeable” (p. 185). This is not to imply there are no shared meanings of terms or to lessen the value of social constructions. By this method we analyze standards as constructions, which institutionalize what people say and do. This sets limits and possibilities for what is, is not, and will be appropriate discourse and practice.

In the following sections, we trace a genealogy of standards by specifying etymological, historical, and conceptual aspects of instructional supervision in the words and conventions that have been built and inhabited by educators since mass public schooling began in Europe and North America. This expounded, contextual understanding of standards may serve as a basis for instructional supervision reform.

Etymology

Etymologies of the word standard indicate a transition from military to civilian and scientific denotations of the word, maintaining strong moral overtones (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English 1990). Whether in a battle, a counting house, a factory, or a laboratory, a standard is more than a neutral point of reference, it is a paragon of rectitude. Williams (1985) captured these moral connotations in his definition:

Instead of referring back to a source of authority, or taking a current measurable state, a standard is set, projected, from ideas about conditions which we have not yet realized but which we think should be realized. There is an active social history in the development of this phrase. (p. 299)

Another historically social understanding of the word standard is rooted in finance and, by analogy, medicine. The often-cited term gold standard represents a shared meaning that implies not only inherent value but also a projection of hierarchy (Michaels, 1986). Literally, a gold standard transubstantiates a lesser element (e.g., paper) into a greater one. In practice, paper representations were exchangeable for gold. In professional fields like law and medicine, an analogous gold standard is assigned to practices generally agreed as best, but nonetheless open to challenge and change, much as monetary standards have changed at regular intervals. The image of immutability and the presence of mutation seem to inhere in every standard.

Historical Background

Processes of making and changing standards were crucial in the development of Western science and the expansion of European nations and empires (Crosby, 1997; Lindberg, 1992). For our genealogy, we will summarize some of the social history of standards since the mid-19th century. That is when a gradual process of weights and measures standardization, as indicated in the above etymologies, rapidly underwent major changes in Europe and North America over a short period of time. Railways, ship lines, and telegraph networks coalesced into something new in human affairs: a network of social, political, and economic systems larger than any single empire. Within a single decade, from 1840 to 1850, a patchwork of local markets merged into a global web tending to form monopolies (Hobsbawm,1975). As information, goods, and services sped around the globe at unprecedented speeds, uniform standards emerged for quantities such as measurement (Alder, 2002), finance (Michaels, 1986), production (Hughes, 1990), time (Landes, 2000), and quality.

Environmental historian William Cronon (1991) described the origins of quality grading in Chicago in the 1850s: as elevators commingled separate crops, farmers were given receipts showing quantity in pounds and quality on a three-part scale. These receipts became commodities to be traded. Soon, derivative instruments such as futures contracts were traded as well. In a world of mass marketing and standardization, anything that could be measured was graded and traded. If a wagonload of wheat could be assigned a grade, so could a can of milk or a portfolio of stocks and bonds.

The first standards for quantities established simple benchmarks but science and industry soon required more complex systems. Most notably, the synchronization of clocks raised many questions. For example, how could noon as measured by the sun directly overhead be replaced by standardized numbers? And, should standards be set requiring timepieces to run together in zones or over the whole globe? If so, how could a signal that takes time to travel ever accomplish perfect synchronization? Before Einstein’s special theory of relativity established the speed of light as a constant, scientists searched for a physical invariant. One of the foremost, Pierre Poincaré of France, proposed that geometric laws offered the best model of standardization but with an inherent contradiction: nature is rarely straight or round. As Galison (2003) summarized,

In differential equations or in the physical systems they represented, there were always many ways of choosing variables—to describe, for instance, the flow lines of water down a stream. What was significant were the underlying relations that remained unchanged even after such changes in description: the vortices in a flow of water, the knots, saddle points, or spiral endpoints of geometrical lines. Similarly, the length of a line remains fixed when we rotate coordinates. These two aspects of Poincaré’s work—the variable and the fixed—emerged together and can only be understood together. He says, in different ways over many years: Manipulate the flexible aspects of knowledge as tools; choose the form that makes the problem at hand simple. Then seize those relations that stand fast despite the choices made. Those fixed relations stand for knowledge that endures. Together the variant and invariant make scientific progress possible. (p. 79)

Standards make certain kinds of science possible, in short, by projecting invariance onto variance.

In the United States, philosophers of science also struggled with antinomies between precision and indeterminacy. Pragmatists such as Chauncey Wright, Charles Pierce, and William James stated that natural phenomena like the weather could be accurately measured but not perfectly predicted. Peirce, Marquand, Franklin, Mitchell, and Gilman (1883) asked whether laws of nature were themselves subject to laws. As Menand (2001) summarized, “Does the principle that everything can be explained have an explanation? Or…does the law of causality (which is another name for the principle that everything can be explained) have a cause?” (p. 275). Philosophers of quantitative science used their inquiries to install their discourses and practices at the top of hierarchies in academia, industry, and the military. Further down the ladders, in qualitative experience, these questions were addressed in everyday routines. Weather forecasts that people saw in their newspapers might be wrong as they walked out their doors, and clocks they saw in their train stations might vary from the ones they carried on their persons, but these standards had as much precision as needed; no more and no less.

The biological sciences give us an example of the development of genetic standards derived from research and from which practices emanate. The Office of Health and Environmental Research in the U.S. Department of Energy developed a plan to map the entire human genome (National Institutes of Health, 1990), now known as the Human Genome Project (HGP). This large-scale process led to standardized medical research and development that not only promised breakthroughs in health care but also had potential for bioethical, legal, and social malfeasance, as Paabo (2001) discussed:

From a medical standpoint, improved predictive capabilities provided by the identification of disease-associated alleles harbor great potential benefits but also problems. The benefits will come from using individualized risk assessment to modify the environmental and behavioral components of common diseases…[but] increased medical predictive power obviously represents a societal challenge in terms of medical insurance, especially in countries that, unlike most Western European countries, are not blessed with health insurance systems that share risks in an equitable fashion among the whole population. (p. 1220)

Standardization does not diminish the consequences of science and technology and may instead intensify them.

The processes by which scientists and policy makers determine whether a standard was sufficient came to be known as conventions, which, as Galison (2003) says, are

likened to terms in language [e.g., French or German] that can be freely chosen and also to the freedom the mathematician or physicist has to choose a coordinate system [e.g., Euclidean or non-Euclidean] as well as a choice between the arbitrary system of meters and kilograms and the arbitrary system of feet and pounds. (p. 82)

As linguistic devices, standards and conventions harbor ambiguities, despite the rhetoric of precision and accuracy in which they are couched. In short, standards are formed by consensus among an elite, who decide which sets of quantities and qualities are most suited to their uses while tacitly agreeing that no one set of standards can be definitive (e.g., American National Standards Institute [ANSI], 2004; International Standards Organization [ISO], 2004; National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST], 2004).

In the alchemy of modernity, standards, despite their artifice and ambiguity, become dominant facts of life for masses who toil by the hour and whose labors are measured, graded, bought, and sold. No one has said it better than Marx and Engels (1848/1998): “All that is solid melts into air, al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Cultural Standards
• Part 3 Process Standards
• Appendix: List of All Proposed Standards