Add KIPP founder Mike Feinberg to the chorus of voices calling for national standards and assessments. In an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, Feinberg calls on President-elect Obama to choose an education secretary who is “committed to accountability and public school choice.”
President-elect Obama should pick a secretary of education who deeply understands the issues of funding and accountability on the federal, state and local levels, and who is passionate about student achievement and growth. Having one national test with one rigorous set of national standards will ensure our children can compete in the global marketplace as well as help parents know how well their children are progressing in school.
I’m increasingly convinced Diane Ravitch has the exact right approach to this with her recent call for national testing based on coherent curriculum standards, but without stakes or sanctions. “The federal role should be to provide accurate information about student performance,” she wrote recently. “It should be left to states and districts to devise sanctions and reforms. If states and localities don’t want to improve their schools, then we are in deeper trouble as a nation than any law passed by Congress can fix.”
In his op-ed, Feinberg also calls for streamlined pathways to the teaching profession, the growth of public charter schools, and a focus on pre-K and early childhood education.
Robert,
What happens if the standards are bad/wrong/poorly thought out (as is the case for the vast majority of state standards)? Who is responsible for ensuring that the standards will enable students to learn well?
If you look at many/most of the state standards they do not embrace the content-rich curricula advocated by Core Knowledge. The standards for the most part are either skill or process dominated. Content, knowledge, and ideas are largely absent as these (very important elements) are controversial and so the standards become watered down to the bare minimum, the non-controversial, which in practice only enables a shoddy, skill-based education at best.
Most of the standards look as if they were vigorously negotiated by an thoughtless committee (too many irrelevant topics, little alignment between grades/subjects, lots of “feel good” demands with no substance nor understanding of how children learn).
What is the likelyhood that “national standards” and assessments based upon those standards will follow the same pattern seen in the state standards that have only for the most part served to hasten the demise of any quality content still left in our public schools?
Even our best state standards do not enable children to learn at levels seen in the best school systems around the world. Standards alone have done *nothing* to help our students to learn better and national standards have the potentially/likely damaging effect of entrenching/cementing the status quo.
We all wish for better schools but national standards offer no path towards improving curricula, teaching, assessments nor the standards themselves.
To improve schools, our country/schools need a plan that actually improves what/how students learn. That means quality and substantial changes/improvements in classroom teaching, curricula and student assessments. There is nothing that national standards will do to improve any one of these three critial elements of schooling and most likely, in practice, will entrench current school practice thus preventing any/all improvements.
National standards will not save schools from themselves.
Erin,
You’re absolutely correct about standards being, for the most part, process standards instead of content standards. That said I’d rather fight one battle for content standards rather than 50 state battles. I also have no illusions that national standards would be a panacea. A single national standard — and more importantly a single national assessment — would create more transparency from school to school and state to state than the current situation that allows states to perpetually lower the bar to create an illusion of proficiency.
Robert,
It wouldn’t be one battle. It would be 50 battles plus one more. Because of the dysfunctional relationship between state education authorities and local control authorities, our schools are locked into the status quo. There currently is no way to improve student learning given the existing contraints/laws currently on the books. Adding one more governmental layer will only further reduce any hope for improvements in our classrooms.
National standards do not address the main problem our schools face: our children are learning very little. Despite the multiple reforms that have been attempted over the last 50 years, it is remarkable how consistent and resistant to change schooling practice is.
But for our schools to become better, schooling practice needs to change/improve. Adding one more layer of government laws/contraints on top of the our current dysfunctional school system will only make it more difficult to enact real improvements in the classroom.
The fight for quality content in our schools will never succeed with a using a “standards” approach either at the state level nor the national level. Even though standards seem as if they should help, in practice, they have done more to cement poor curricula and assessments than we had prior to the standards movements. How would national standards be any different?
Improvements in schools requires something quite different than the process/skill standards currently in use. It requires what E.D. Hirsch et al. did at the beginning of the Core Knowledge movement: structure the ideas, content and knowledge from grade to grade. And then develop specific curricula/syllabi that support that knowledge growth. There is almost no chance of that happening within our current educational environment.
All educational reform must be done at the state level as that is where the laws regarding schools organization and evaluation are made. Calling for national standards will only make the educational reform process even more difficult.
Erin,
The dead-bang piece of your argument is when you note, “Even though standards seem as if they should help, in practice, they have done more to cement poor curricula and assessments than we had prior to the standards movements.” Here’s what I know: we’re not going to improve educational outcomes–from reading scores to college readiness–until or unless we start insisting on a broad, rich curriculum for all students. I don’t need to have the answer to how to do it, but I want to see it happen. So if standards, even content standards, aren’t the path, what is?
Robert,
Our school system is designed to perpetuate the status quo. This wouldn’t be a bad thing if the status quo was exceptional, but unfortunately it isn’t. But our school system has no mechanism to change, adapt or improve.
If you look at effective school systems around the world, there are 2 common system organizational features that largely contribute to their success:
1. The responsibility for deciding and implementing what students are to learn is not placed upon the shoulders of the teachers/schools alone. The responsibility for ensuring students enjoy a well rounded education is usually placed in the hands of a central office (national and/or local). Public criticism of that nation’s schools usually is directed at the central office, not the classroom.
2. Student evaluation and teaching are done by 2 distinct groups. That is there are no effective school systems that uses grades as the primary evaluation of whether students have learned the material. The reasons why this can enable quality student learning are many but probably include: a) better student-teacher relationship when grading is not done in the classroom, b) a need by the central office to explicitly delineate what students need to learn to be successful, c) the improvement in classroom dynamics when students are competing for a limited amount of grades issued by the teachers etc… Certainly when central exams are used at the primary mechanism of evaluating students, Woessmann (2002) found that those students on average score 35-47% better.
So the international evidence strongly suggests that what is preventing our students from learning well is our school system itself. That is this illusion of “local control” really means no control and even worse no way of improving our schools. Certainly 50 years of multiple, diverse reforms in the US have resulted in little/no change in student learning.
The evidence strongly suggests that it is the way our schools are organized that prevents any and all improvements.
So what our schools need:
1. Checks and balances in the schools system with a clear distribution of responsibility (not just authority) between state officials and classrooms. Compared to our current system this would result in state officials being held responsible for deciding what students should learn and developing a clear process for developing quality materials (either by the state or contracted with curricula companies) that satisfy specific course requirements and the classroom/teacher would be responsible for connecting that material with the students.
2. Starting in middle school: a specific syllabus for each course developed by the state with end-of-course exams coupled with un-graded teacher certified performance expectations (writing reports, presentations, projects, etc…). This should also include a system for evaluating and improving the course design as well as the flexibility to offer multiple types of courses that would still satisfy graduation requirements. High school graduation would be a certification by the state that the student has passed the requirements.
3. Focused applied research on how to improve specific areas of weaknesses. This is an area that the Feds could help immensely. That is: have the Feds (could also be states, foundations, etc…) sponsor a competitive 5 year research/development collaboration with a school district, curricula development company, assessment developers, teaching consultants, etc. with the specific requirement that all data, interviews and results become published afterwards and distributed among the wider teaching community. This is particularly needed in the elementary grades as the currently used curricula/teaching needs dramatic improvement.
This type of approach to schooling requires changes in state law. Note that this does not mean that we would need a single, one-size fits all type of schooling. In fact this could be rather flexible and yet still be rigorous.
I realize that this is rather outside the scope of American discussion (but well within what all other effective countries are doing). But for our students to learn well, the school system itself needs to change.