Standards, Standards Everywhere and Not a Spot to Think

While in middle school, my daughter exited school one day, and as she climbed into the car, she complained that all anyone cared about was PACT, the high-stakes assessment implemented in South Carolina. At 11, she was already aware of the mania in our schools for tests and, although she was not aware of them, the state standards those tests were designed to measure. Her exasperation led me to write about that mania and its negative impact on literacy instruction (Thomas, 2001b). Since then, our fate as teachers of literacy has worsened because of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—the federal component of the current accountability movement.

The layering of federal mandates on top of state accountability has created a dynamic that is destroying the few strides we had made in the teaching of reading and writing throughout the mid- and late-1900s—notable movements toward whole language approaches and the tremendous contribution of the National Writing Project to the teaching of writing in authentic settings and best practice in the English Language Arts. Within a few years after the implementation of NCLB, evidence was mounting that this unprecedented federal assault on education was having a profound and negative effect on literacy instruction at many levels (Thomas, 2004).

In this chapter, I will discuss the evolution of the Bureaucratic Script for literacy instruction that began with A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) and continues to escalate as we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. In many ways, the Bureaucratic Script is twenty-first-century literacy since, as I will discuss, the political mandates and the measurement systems connected to those mandates have become the de facto literacy of our students and the de facto literacy curriculum of our schools.