Teachers Unveil English Standards Document Immediately Attacked As Too Vague, Politically Correct

What should a student competent in English know and be able to do?

After three years of internal debate and against a backdrop of growing political division over national education goals two English teachers’ organizations offered Monday a set of national standards described as their profession’s vision of 21st century literacy.

The 130-page document is not prescriptive by design - it does not explicitly tell parents and educators what books every 12th-grader should have read or what kind of writing every fifth-grader should be able to produce.

“This is a vision … not a national curriculum,” said Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English, one of the groups that devised the guidelines.

But the proposed standards were immediately panned by federal officials and education leaders as too vague and lacking the concrete benchmarks that help parents ascertain how well their children - and their schools - perform. “It doesn’t result in anything that is clearly measurable,” said Michael Cohen, senior adviser to U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley.

Some reading experts were disappointed that the standards fail to stress the importance of phonics as the most powerful way to teach young children how to identify words. And conservative critics of the national standards movement had harsh words for the references to multiculturalism and apparent endorsement of bilingual education.

“This is the history scenario all over again,” said Jeanne Allen of the conservative, Washington-based Center for Education Reform, referring to the uproar from the political right that followed the release of national history standards two years ago. “There seems to be a lot of ‘political correctness’ throughout the whole document.”

The English standards, like the history standards, have had a troubled history. Federal funding for the project was yanked by the Clinton administration two years ago because of disagreements over the content. The National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association, the other group involved in drafting the standards, went ahead on their own, spending $1 million to produce the document unveiled in Washington Monday.

The standards were due out last year, but debate within the English teaching profession over a number of issues delayed their release. Some of the profession’s most prominent members could not even agree that national standards were necessary.

The document offers 12 recommendations, many of which make common-sense statements about what all students should strive for in the language arts of reading, writing, listening and speaking.

The first, for instance, states that students should be exposed to a wide range of print and non-print texts, including fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.

Other guidelines recommend that students be encouraged to adapt their use of language for various audiences - they should, for example, be able to write in a diary, draft a letter to the editor, compose and send e-mail, as well as answer essay questions for school.

The standards also make frequent mention of multicultural issues. The document says one purpose of reading, for instance, is to gain understanding of the cultures of the United States and the world. They also say that students should develop understanding of and respect for “diversity in language use” that may exist because of cultural differences, in part because today’s classroom reflects the nation’s changing makeup.

One of the standards also makes a strong statement in support of bilingual education, a controversial approach that calls for teaching students in their primary language before making the transition to allEnglish instruction.