Three more weeks of school to go, and I’ve had to give the blog a rest – swimming hard just to tread water. But a surge of interest in curriculum reform holds promise for messy conflict and endless debate about what school is – or should be – about, and this seems like a good time to jump in. AFT president, Randi Weingarten, making a case for national education standards, touches on the problem of reaching consensus on what those standards would be about:
Education is a local issue, but there is a body of knowledge about what children should know and be able to do that should guide decisions about curriculum and testing. I propose that a broad-based group — made up of educators, elected officials, community leaders, and experts in pedagogy and particular content — come together to take the best academic standards and make them available as a national model. Teachers then would need the professional development, and the teaching and learning conditions, to make the standards more than mere words.
Aside from the logical difficulty of having a “broad-based group” come together to address “a local issue,” we might also wonder how that cadre of leaders and experts would be formed. As it happens, the list of people scheduled to attend Congressman George Miller’s hearing on “Strengthening America’s Competitiveness through Common Academic Standards” this week might give us an idea. And if a recent statement [pdf] by Miller holds any clues about where he stands, we should expect to hear a lot more about the Data Quality Campaign, which has many endorsing partners. Benchmarked common standards will be the accompanying theme.
The track record of the standards movement over the last 20 years leaves little good to show for itself. To bring some coherence to what is, and maybe should be happening, Thomas Mertz asks and answers the question, “What’s at stake with the standards movement?: ‘[T]he kind of individuals we are developing and the kind of nation we wish to be.’” He posted a video with an interview by William A. Proefriedt, author of High Expectations: The Cultural Roots of Standards Reform in American Education,” which was reviewed in TC Record.
From Emerson’s Education:
I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.
Worth a look.
6 Comments
Great video, thanks. Standards are fine, but I wish we didn’t have so MANY of them.
I’m stuck trying to puzzle out how one writes a standard to address the following (clipped from a MySpace survey):
Do or did you like school?
its lame…but everyone should still finish it.
I don’t recall ever seeing a standard written for affective goals, but I know that it’s the first and last standard considered by students when they evaluate a class.
If the standards movement over the past 20 years has a less than stellar track record, might that have something to do with the fact that we tried to push through standards-based reform on the cheap? In many cases, inadequate state-level assessments became de-facto standards, and educators had access few, if any, resources to align their instruction with exemplary curricula or standards–assuming such curricula or standards even existed.
This state of affairs does little to advance the competitiveness agenda or the democracy agenda. Is it necessarily an indictment of a standards agenda?
Claus,
Some of my colleagues and I met with the state Commissioner of Ed a few years ago when the testing phase began. We asked him about performance assessments, as opposed to multiple choice tests, and he said that authentic assessments were too expensive to administer. End of story. So, yes, the tests and textbooks become the defacto curriculum. The curriculum and standards documents, no matter the quality, are less consequential than the actual on-the-ground material we have to work with. Another resource we could make good use of would be more regular classroom teachers, rather than the host of grant-funded paraprofessionals we’ve been provided through Title 1, which presents scheduling and planning challenges that result in a disjointed experience for students, and much wasted time.
The competitiveness agenda encourages individuals to work hard in order to overcome these – and other – structural limitations. I call it the “standards movement,” but it would be more accurate to call it the “standardizing movement.” The lack of flexibility in the accountability mechanism, coupled with the lack of integrity in the material and social supports for students and teachers creates dysfunction. Individual effort can smooth some of the bumps, but it won’t fill the major voids.
Maybe I simplify too much, but there seems to be a direct correlation between the distance of standards and assessment from the student and the effectiveness of it all. The correlation is this: the farther away from the student that standards and assessment originate, the less effective it is. I can’t imagine that anyone who works in education at a district or school would disagree with me on that. So, when I lament the current ridiculousness of standards and assessment because they currently reside at the state level, so far away from the student and the local communities, it actually makes me gag to think of what a disaster it will be to try and move all of this nonsense to the federal level.
My proposal? State and federal governments should concentrate their well-meaning money and effort on creating standards and processes for how local teachers assess kids THEMSELVES, HOLISTICALLY, and how local communities should assess the individual schools and districts that serve them. They might actually have a shot at creating a useful framework that way.
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