Policy Is Not Enough: Language and the Interpretation of State Standards

Abstract

Words have no inherent meaning. Instead, they signify ideas or actions ascribed to them by communities, and meanings for specific words often vary across those communities. Words that carry specialized meanings in one community can be interpreted differently by another, particularly where individuals in the second community have little access to dialogues in the first, or when forces in the second community compete to assign meaning to key words. Observations of one district’s mathematics curriculum writing committee suggested a disconnect of this sort occurred along the policymaker/teacher divide in one state. Where state standards used words like “construct” and “concept” to imply certain mathematics teaching methods, teachers reading these documents imputed more local, and sometimes conventional, definitions to these words. As a result, state standards lost their force. This article describes and analyzes the work of state-local policy reconciliation as it occurred in this committee, and appraises that work’s implications for reform efforts that rely on language as a medium for communication.