This essay is using Chicago Style, the standard for historians that the author would like to honour.
The past couple decades have witnessed the rise of the standards movement in education, a push by governments around the world to standardized educational expectations and assessments. This global push has often led to a rise of government power at the federal or provincial (state) level at the expense of municipal educational institutions. This article discusses the features of this global movement and the resistance it faces by educators in the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO), a “primary hub” of alternative educators around the world. This historical analysis relies on The AERO-Gramme Newsletter and The Education Revolution, AERO’s official publications between 1989 to 2011. In these documents historians gain an insight into the ideas, policies, and actions of AERO’s members at the time.
Background on Alternative Education and AERO
So, who are these alternative educators in AERO? The genesis of the contemporary alternative education movement can be traced back to the 1960s when disillusioned educators engaged with highly innovative practices that departed from the contemporary standards of practice such as: a focus on open inquiry-based learning; student-teacher learning contracts; gradeless classrooms; self-paced learning; giving students and teachers the ability to vote on school policy; and caring for the needs of the learner beyond just academic concerns.4
These unconventional pedagogues helped initiate the rise of the open schools movement within the public system, which instituted more humanistic and holistic conceptions of pedagogy familiar to educators today.5 Many of these radical educators identified themselves as alternatives to mainstream public schooling, teacher-centered education, or the traditionally elitist pedagogies of the time.6 Over the course of the 1990’s, educators from around the world who identified with these ideals coalesced into the AERO network.
Like an island of misfit toys, the organization functioned as a global forum for unconventional educators who did not fit the increasingly standardized education system of their homelands. These educators ranged from public school educators who assisted at-risk youth; teachers of specialty public school programs; outdoor educators; associations of Waldorf, Montessori, and Reggio Emilia schools; unconventional private schools; homeschool resource centers; to democratic free schoolers.
What is the Standards Movement?
By the 1980s, neoconservatives within the United States had proclaimed that the American public education system was in a state of “crisis.”7 The solution? To use the newly established federal Department of Education to establish a uniform set of education standards and assessments.8 The American “Standards Movement” had begun.
The Standards Movement can be characterized by an emphasis on outcomes- based education that can be measured by the implementation of standardized testing. But how did these governments capture the unique value of each educational program in a standardized assessment? In short, it was impossible, and they were unable to do so. This was something alternative educators were keenly aware of. Many of these programs helped at-risk youth, like young mothers or students deemed behaviorally unruly by conventional schools, who would have otherwise dropped out of the public system.
In the standards movement, an emphasis was placed on creating a common set of educational standards that could be assessed by standardized tests and school inspectors.
At first glance, the lower test scores of such alternative schools and programs would be lower than their traditional counterparts, but does this delegitimize the services they provide? Of course not, their self-described goals and success criteria vary considerably from what standardized tests are trying to measure. Take the arts, academic, or vocational specialty programs, which aim to have students master a niche discipline. Their assessments are not equivalent to the metrics of a standardized assessment. Moreover, cultural-linguistic or religious schools, whose focus is on preserving, promoting, and learning about specific cultural identities face the same conundrum.
In the standards movement, an emphasis was placed on creating a common set of educational standards that could be assessed by standardized tests and school inspectors. To achieve this, a “back-tobasics” approach was promoted, stripping away curricular nuance in favor of lessons that were “taught to the test.”9 But what determined which disciplines counted as the “basic” subjects?
The reforms were framed as preparing students for the increasingly technological and competitive global marketplace, thereby defining “basics” as those subjects that best served the economic interests of the nation.10 This worked to increasingly subordinate the education system under the direction of the federal government.11 Students who struggled to achieve these standards (either because of disinterest or other difficulties) were “referred”11 to remedial programs, where they would be further streamed away from their fellow students.12 Members of the AERO’s international network noticed the rise of similar reforms, and together worked to resist the centralization of national power over education.
Resistance to the Standards Movement
In 2000, the Office of Standards in Education (Ofsted) threatened to close Summerhill School for lack of “efficient and suitable instruction.”13 Now Summerhill was not just a school, it was a symbol of student freedom amongst alternative educators. At Summerhill classes were not compulsory, and policy and disciplinary decisions were made via whole-school meetings where both students and staff each received a vote.
AERO quickly rallied to the school’s defense, encouraging educators to write to the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, the Rt. Honorable David Blunkett, as well as arranging the next International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) to be hosted at the school.14 This brought democratic school educators, and other alternative educators, to Summerhill in its time of need. Eventually Summerhill won their case. After asking the judge if they could borrow a courtroom in London’s Royal Courts Justice for one of their meetings, the school voted to accept the settlement proposed by Ofsted.15
The following year in the United States, AERO’s members helped organize and participate in protests against No Child Left Behind (2001), as well as local “action groups” focused on resisting similar reforms.16 The bipartisan bill tied federal financed rewards and punishments to the standardized test scores of public schools.17 Alternative schools and programs within the USA reported being punished for deviating from backto- basics education and the formal curriculum. These pedagogues continue to resist the push to control and homogenize education at the local level.
4 CherylM Lange and SandraJ. Sletten, “Alternative Education: A Brief History Research Synthesis,” 01 2002, 8–12.
5 Richard Neumann, “The Alternative Schools Movement Goes Public,” in Sixties Legacy: A History of the Public Alternative Schools Movement, 1967-2001 (P. Lang, 2003), 105–6.
6 Neumann, 125–26.
7 Sylvia L. Mendez, Monica S. Yoo, and John L. Rury, “A Brief History of Public Education in the United States,” in The Wiley Handbook of School Choice, ed. Robert A. Fox and Nina K. Buchanan, 1st ed. (Wiley, 2017), 21.
8 Mendez, Yoo, and Rury, 21.
9 Richard Neumann, “The 1980s and 1990s,” in Sixties Legacy: A History of the Public Alternative Schools Movement, 1967-2001 (P. Lang, 2003), 200–201.
10 Neumann, 198–200.
11 Mendez, Yoo, and Rury, “A Brief History of Public Education in the United States,” 21–23.
12 Richard Neumann, “Toward a System of Diversified, High-Quality Education: 1973-1979,” in Sixties Legacy: A History of the Public Alternative Schools Movement, 1967- 2001 (P. Lang, 2003), 133.
13 AERO, “Issue #27 After Columbine,” Summer 1999, 10.
14 An interesting note is that the school reported having test scores than the national average. AERO, 49–50; AERO, “Issue #28 IDEC at Summerhill,” Fall 1999, 1.
15 AERO, “Issue #29 Summerhill Court Victory,” Spring 2000, 5.
16 AERO, “Issue #32 Special Changing Schools Section,” Spring/Summer 2001, 6.
17 Maris A. Vinovskis, “History of Testing in the United States: PK–12 Education,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 683, no. 1 (May 2019): 34.
REFERENCES
AERO. “Issue #27 After Columbine,” Summer 1999.
AERO. “Issue #28 IDEC at Summerhill,” Fall 1999.
AERO. “Issue #29 Summerhill Court Victory,” Spring 2000.
AERO. “Issue #32 Special Changing Schools Section,” Spring/Summer 2001.
Lange, CherylM, and SandraJ. Sletten. “Alternative Education: A Brief History Research Synthesis,” 01 2002.
Mendez, Sylvia L., Monica S. Yoo, and John L. Rury. “A Brief History of Public Education in the United States.” In The Wiley Handbook of School Choice, edited by Robert A. Fox and Nina K. Buchanan, 1st ed., 13–27. Wiley, 2017.
Neumann, Richard. “The 1980s and 1990s.” In Sixties Legacy: A History of the Public Alternative Schools Movement, 1967-2001. P. Lang, 2003.
Neumann, Richard. “The Alternative Schools Movement Goes Public.” In Sixties Legacy: A History of the Public Alternative Schools Movement, 1967-2001. P. Lang, 2003.
Neumann, Richard. “Toward a System of Diversified, High-Quality Education: 1973-1979.” In Sixties Legacy: A History of the Public Alternative Schools Movement, 1967-2001. P. Lang, 2003.
Vinovskis, Maris A. “History of Testing in the United States: PK–12 Education.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 683, no. 1 (May 2019): 22–37.