Valley Commentary : Education Could Finally Get That Long-Awaited Wakeup Call : Standards is the buzzword, and everybody is jumping on the bandwagon to write them. Patience is needed because big changes won’t happen overnight.

If Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in the 1930s and had awakened in 1994, the only place where he’d feel comfortable would be in a public school. There he would find the same dusty chalkboards, rows of desks occupied by kids doing long division with pencils and teachers lecturing in front of classes.

The rest of society, of course, has moved from agrarian to industrial and on to an information-driven age. Yet we are teaching the kids the same old things in the same old way, preparing them for an industrial-based workplace which is growing more and more rare.

Happily, there is a chance that substantive change is under way. Standards is the buzzword of the hour; everybody is jumping on the bandwagon to write them--and the President is driving the bandwagon.

Goals 2000, a new federal program aimed at education reform conceived during a 1990 governors’ conference headed by then Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, was signed into law last week by President Bill Clinton. It is an effort to put the federal government in a leadership role in establishing national scholastic and skills standards. It calls on local school districts to establish higher standards to prepare our children to enter the 21st Century. The federal government is offering seed money to schools that accept the challenge.

Los Angeles, anticipating passage of the law, had already started thinking seriously about standards, through a program it calls the Quality Education Design Collaborative. This is an effort to establish a set of communally agreed-upon education standards whose attainment would assure a graduate’s post-high-school success.

Back in January, intrigued by the question “What do our students need to know?” I joined the voluntary project and attended a three-day training session at UCLA. There, Charlotte Higuchi, a Los Angeles elementary school instructor assigned to the QED-C, introduced 114 teachers, parents, business leaders and community representatives to the national debate on standards.

A national standard is quite broad. It might look something like this: “Students will be able to reflect on what they have learned from a variety of sources and apply that knowledge.”

*

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, acting on its own, began a discussion five years ago and has written broad national standards for math.

For example: “In grades K-4 the study of mathematics should emphasize problem solving so that students can: use problem solving approaches to investigate and understand mathematical content; formulate problems from every day and mathematical situations; and verify and interpret results with respect to the original problem.” The National Education Standards and Improvement Council being created by the new federal law could do worse than to adopt the math teachers’ standards.

School districts are to decide what will happen in classrooms so students can meet these objectives. In Los Angeles this is happening with volunteers who include teachers, parents and outsiders.

Last week, the QED-C debuted its standards program to participants from 200 schools at eight sites around the city. Larry Tesh, the principal at Walter Reed Junior High School in North Hollywood, hosted our session. Nearly 60 people attended, primarily teachers and parents.

The meeting went slowly, and we got off track occasionally, but after two hours we were fairly focused and into a substantive discussion of what kids need to know.

We have five more meetings scheduled between now and June. (Anyone is welcome; call an LAUSD school for dates and places.) When we’re done, we will have a set of standards we think are important. Our ideas will be compiled and consolidated with standards from the other sites. And that will be only the beginning.

Raising school standards is not just a job for educators. Parents will have to see that their children report to school ready to learn, and some students will have to work a lot harder. We will need community support in the form of technologically equipped classrooms, and we will need patience because big changes won’t happen overnight.

Nevertheless, I’m feeling more optimistic than usual these days. I’m on the bandwagon.

We teachers don’t have to wait for the process to be completed before asking more of students. I’ve been reading the preliminary report, prepared by the National Council for Teachers of English, on national language arts standards. It contains some model lesson plans aimed at pushing high school students to meet broad goals. One, for example, sets out to help kids find real-life meaning in literature by discussing a passage in “Black Boy,” the Richard Wright novel, and then writing about prejudice in their own lives.

More and more, instead of just putting a grade on a paper I’m asking that students’ assignments be rewritten.

I’m also re-examining my lesson plans, throwing away those that don’t meet the highest standards and keeping those that do. And my wastebasket is usually full.