The extent to which national, state, and city standards should be allowed to govern public education is a difficult question for a number of reasons. As a product of both a public elementary and junior high school in which much of what I learned was decided at the state level and also of a private school where the curriculum for each class was designed, often exclusively by one or two teachers, I believe that there are positive and negative aspects of both sides of the standards debate.

First, I believe that Deborah Meier's and Linda Darling-Hammond's argument that policies and standards designed at the national or state level without the input of teachers who will actually be implementing these standards are doomed to failure. While attending my town's public junior high school in rural Vermont, I remember my teachers often seeming frustrated by the work they were forced to give us. For example, in the mid 1990's, as I understand it, Vermont implemented a new policy stating that once every semester, junior high school students in the state would stop following their regular class schedules and instead stay in their homerooms all day, working on a certain state-assigned project.

Although the idea behind projects- allowing students to learn more independently than usual and apply what they had been learning in their classes- was well founded, at my school there were often problems with the implementation of the policy because the teachers there had not been involved in the initial planning. The fact that the teachers had no feeling of ownership toward the new policy made it difficult for them to get excited about what their students were doing and in turn, made it difficult for the students to be passionate about their work.

On the other hand, as Darling-Hammond mentions in her article, for the most part the standards developed at the state level in Vermont have been wildly successful largely because the state makes a point of involving experienced teachers in the development of policy and insists that all teachers attend conferences which outline, explain, and elaborate on how new policies can be implemented and why they have been put into effect.

Although in my experience, state mandated standards have been mostly well-implemented and successful when teachers are involved in their development, I have also seen the adverse effects that large policy decisions made at the national level may have upon both entire school systems and individual children. During the spring of 2005 I had the opportunity to work as a Special Education Paraprofessional at the same elementary school I had attended as a child. I worked closely with fourth grade teachers (including my fourth grade teacher) and through both my observations of their teaching and my discussions with them, I began to understand the negative impact that poorly-thought out national policy might have.

The President's No Child Left Behind policy, for example, has adversely affected the children and teachers learning and working at the elementary school I attended. Ironically, the children most adversely affected are the very children that the policy seeks to help. As a Special Ed aid, my job was to work with a number of different children who were learning disabled in some way. Although I worked from 9am to 3pm everyday, I often only got to spend only between 3 and 4 hours with the children I was supposed to be helping due to the paperwork I was required to fill out because of the NCLB policy. Although I understood the reason for all of the extra paperwork- the policy requires that time spent with every child is specifically logged and reported to the state government- I often left school at the end of the day feeling as though I could have been of much more help to the kids with whom I was working had I not been forced to spend so much time adhering to the policy.

That said, while my experience teaching under national education standards was somewhat negative, I still believe that it is important to take into account the importance of the "cultural literacy" which Hirsch, Kett, and Trefil discuss in their article. But I, unlike Hirsh, believe that this "cultural literacy" should include aspects of the myriad cultures that flourish in the United States. Because children of many cultural backgrounds attend public schools in this country, multicultural learning in public education is an essential learning tool that will create a greater degree of understanding among cultures.

The fact that children must share basic information in order to succeed in this country cannot be ignored. In naming the basic concepts that children should be taught, national standards could be extremely effective. The mistakes so often made by higher-ups in government are the failure to recognize that cultural literacy is a multidimensional phenomenon that must be broadened in order to be effective and the lack of willingness to involve classroom teachers in the planning of federal reforms.