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James O’Connor
Professor Sandy Grande
EDU 450
27 April 2015
Standardization and the Ideal Student
For the past semester, I have been teaching at Waterford High School in Waterford, CT.
Most students’ familial backgrounds can be considered middle class to upper middle class.
While students’ socioeconomic backgrounds affect how they see themselves and how their peers
and teachers see them in the school setting, the technology and assessments used in the school
also impact students’ images. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish describes aspects of the
school environment, particularly when it comes to the effects which increased efficiency and
changing technology have on students’ identities.
In the third part of Discipline and Punish, Foucault discusses the changing position and
qualities of the individual. Of the summative claims he makes, the following most readily
applies to the United States: “The more one possesses power or privilege, the more one is
marked as an individual, by rituals, written accounts or visual reproductions” (192). This
describes the ways in which media portray prominent entertainers and politicians. Those
responsible for the most exemplary performances, or those who most ardently oppose themselves
to their own party’s principles, enjoy a distinction which, because of how widely media cover it,
paints such individuals as true originals in their words and actions.
By deciding which traits are those of a pioneer, ones who influence and control
mainstream media also determine which members of their society exhibit those traits. Success
then becomes a measure of how closely a candidate fits into dominant narratives about
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individualism and its most commonly accepted traits. This leads to a standardization of the
image of a leader. Those candidates who meet the criteria for the ideal leader also meet success,
while the media labels as deviant or unfit to fill a position those who do not fit comfortably
within accepted paradigms for leadership.
While they apply to politics and images in the mainstream media, Foucault’s ideas also
play into the dynamics of the classroom. Through one process or another, students can and do
lose their senses of individuality. One process, and perhaps the most widely and visibly debated
one, is that by which Common Core State Standards have become nearly ubiquitous. The
Standards themselves represent “a principle of compulsory visibility” (187). Though removed
from context, albeit not as far as one might at first assume, Foucault’s analyzing the examination
describes the way in which standards pervade students’ learning. The Common Core confers
upon students a standard character, similar to the ways in which a political candidate represents
supporters and critics in general ways that are exceedingly easy to digest but not totally
representative. The Standards are not harmful simply for their being standards; rather, they pose
a threat to recognizing individual differences in the classroom because they can lead to
standardization of students’ images. When Daniel E. Ferguson talks about students’ being
silenced by The Standards, he highlights the ways in which they downplay students’ voices as a
means to convey language as neither fluid in its meaning nor in students’ interpretations of it.
The political candidate makes the voter more visible, though in the capacity of being able to vote
according to certain standards. The Common Core does the same to students.
While the faculty in the Waterford High School English Department implements
Common Core State Standards without much conflict, the role which state standardized tests
play in students’ lives has been a topic of conversation at department meetings. Members of the
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school community have proposed that, rather than use students’ scores on CAPT or SBAC as
determinants for whether or not students graduate, PSAT and SAT scores can replace the state
exams. Since many students at Waterford High School apply to college and take those exams,
some in the community believe the proposal makes sense. One of the first concerns which came
up, though, had to do with covering the cost of the exams. During one department meeting, a
faculty member noted that not every student at the high school chooses to apply to college and
ought not to pay for either exam. Another educator in the room added to this by saying that
unless the district pays for the exams, any number of students, regardless of their postgraduate
plans, could face challenges in covering costs. The consensus in the room was that the district’s
adopting the PSAT and SAT, both designed by The College Board, would have more to do with
increased speed and efficiency in assessing students than it would with creating an assessment
based on meaningful knowledge. Some at the meeting also noted the connection between
Common Core State Standards and various College Board exams, citing such connections as
evidence that The College Board has profit, rather than students’ learning, as its primary goal.
Whether or not The College Board desires profit over meaningful learning, the changing
formats of the PSAT and SAT, along with the changes in technologies used to administer and
complete those exams, harken back to Foucault’s writing. Though he says it in the context of
changes in military science, Foucault makes a very relevant statement about changes in
technology and increasing demands for efficiency:
Thus a new demand appears to which discipline must respond: to construct a
machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the
elementary parts of which it is composed. Discipline is no longer simply an art of
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distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of
composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine. (164)
Foucault considers the efforts taken toward ever increasing standardization. On the one hand,
Waterford High School has Common Core State Standards; on the other, it could implement
standardized tests which, though increasingly more efficient, take less and less into consideration
when it comes to the individual differences of those who take the tests. Such exams will less
likely encourage students to access their own talents and skills, and they will require students to
act according to a single, watered down image of the ideal student.
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Works Cited
Ferguson, Daniel E. “Martin Luther King Jr. and the Common Core.” Rethinking Schools.
Rethinking Schools, Winter 2013-2014. Web. 14 January 2015.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House,
1975. Print.