The Religion of American Public Schooling: Standards, Fidelity, and Cardinal Principles

Abstract

This article focuses on the possible ways in which the standards movement and the assessments and curricular interventions that come along with it, draw on inherently religious (Judeo–Christian) language and traditions. Contributing to a larger critical conversation about standards and impact on education, and building on an emerging scholarly engagement about the (both explicit and implicit) role of religion in public education, this article examines the language framing standards and its structures and makes the point that, while a given document need not reference religious texts explicitly, as in the case of standards, it may nevertheless be guided by undergirding theological histories and sensibilities as we explore the standards movement more broadly and the Common Core more specifically. We thus attend closely to the notion of Cardinal Principles and the concept of standards in American education, seeking to connect standardization as a program of learning, to long-standing notions about, for instance, testing and student possibility rooted firmly in religious—particularly Judeo–Christian—assumptions. We close by taking seriously a recent call to consider the resacralization of society and research, particularly education research.

Notes

¹The work seems all the more timely given the recent Supreme Court decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014) in which the Court held that the practice of sectarian prayer at the opening of local legislative sessions did not violate the Establishment Clause, even though only Christian chaplains (of various stripes) had been invited to give their benediction over the entirety of the history of the practice. This was not, presumably, the establishment of state religion because, we might say, the state religion was already assumed to be de facto Christian. Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, asserted that holding “that invocations must be non-sectarian would force the legislatures sponsoring prayers and the courts deciding these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech,” forgetting, presumably, that in choosing who would give the prayer, the legislature had already done such work. Still, we think the point holds that in law, as in schooling (subject to the law and perhaps about to change in relation to new decisions under the cover of law) in the American context is very ready to ignore its own religious commitments, viewing them as neutral if viewing them at all.

²It is interesting to consider the use of the term “common” here. The term does a great deal of work that we might usefully attend to. It seems clear that the authors of the “text” sought to connect the standards to the Common Schools movement that created public education as we knew/know it in America; beyond this there is the sense of a common shared space in which people might congregate and discuss issues of importance. Still, the OED reminds us that the word shares a root with “Communion,” a word freighted with religious importance in Christian settings. Still, there is the connotation of the term, connected to the historical adjectival appendage used to smear women of low birth or morals. And so the common, though it is a rather common word, comes to mean that which is shared, that which is religious and that which is low, base, and in many settings, of “ordinary or inferior quality.”

³Former Governor Mike Huckabee's comments after the Sandy Hook shootings are illustrative as he explained, “we have systematically removed God from our schools” noting that he was “not suggesting by any stretch that if we had prayer in schools regularly as we once did that this wouldn't have happened” having just, well, suggested as much (Huckabee, 2012).

⁴These are not, of course, the only religious documents that might fit the bill of “standard” bearing. We use them, however, as emblems of the kinds of standards-as-religious documents whose distant ancestors come to us in the form of (facially secular) educational standards. Of course, these theological documents are educational and set standards themselves.

⁵“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Most recently, and from the standpoint of the cauterization (and perhaps fraught nature) of American sport and religion, one can easily find images of this passage in the eye black of Tim Tebow, a collegiate quarterback at the University of Florida. His Biblical messages, in fact, led the governing body, the NCAA to ban eye black messages. Still the signs in the stands persist.

⁶We do not intend to be inflammatory here. We are not meaning to read the Bible confrontationally—to suggest that it is not, say, about salvation and love of neighbor on many levels—but to continue in the footsteps of a long-standing interpretive tradition which sees scripture not, as Dante wrote of poetry as “a truth hidden beneath a beautiful lie” but rather as containing “a two-layered truth hidden beneath another truth. It is a two-layered truth, one layer expressed in the sensible words and the other in the veiled meanings behind them” (Hendel, 2013, p. 111). The veiled (and often even the sensible) meanings of the text, we think, can be very clearly tied to testing, assessment, and the enforcement of standards of practice.

⁷For some other examples: “God has come to test you” (Exodus 20:20); “Please let me test just once more” (Judges 6:39); “Prove me, O LORD, and try me; test my heart and my mind” (Psalm 26:2); “I the LORD search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds” (Jeremiah 17:10).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Burke

Kevin Burke is a Faculty Fellow with the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame. His interests sit at the intersections of curriculum theory, religion, and queer theory.

Avner Segall

Avner Segall is an Associate Professor of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. He is interested in how particular versions and visions of education, teaching, and learning are made possible during preservice teacher education as well as what they make possible for students learning to teach.