A Foucauldian Report on Standards and Testing in Art Education Curriculum.

This paper begins with the following quote from Michel Foucault: "People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does." The context of the paper and the policy directions considered encompass the past decade and take the National Curriculum as an intervention in curriculum that rehabilitated standards to signify the neoconservative, restorationist, or neocorporate agenda that replaces and works against the progressivist education of the 1960s and 1970s. Although the National Curriculum project did not rely upon the use of standards, the structure and emphasis in the "Elements of the Profile" are on levels, level statements, outcomes, pointers, and work samples. The paper finds that a sample of recent literature and commentary on standards reveals: (1) the currently high levels of popular community support for an education addressing the standards are welcomed by politicians and expressed through statutory authorities; (2) there is a contention about standards in the measurement field; and (3) standards policy frameworks do not guarantee improvement or quality reform. Each of these represents a set of problems for art education. Within art education several attempts have been made to articulate a position about standards that will enable a standards discourse to work for art educators, and it reviews the papers which comprise these attempts. Contains 35 references. (BT)