The Gates Foundation “will advocate for the politically thorny goal of national standards — and will aim to write its own standards and its own national test,” reports Elizabeth Green at Gotham Schools.
The edusphere is reacting with arched eyebrows. “Gates-made national standards creep me out a little bit,” says Alexander Russo at This Week in Education, “I’d rather the states or the USDE develop the tests than the Gates Foundation do it.” At Eduwonkette, Aaron Pallas, aka “skoolboy,” laughed out loud at Green’s piece.
Does anybody else think this is a really, really bad idea? I’m delighted that the Gates Foundation has realized that throwing money at small schools didn’t work, but I’m not prepared to turn over the public’s interest in what is to be taught and learned to a private philanthropy, no matter how civic-minded it may be.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but industry lobbyists regularly play a role in policy and legislation where they have enormous self-interest with nary a peep. If it’s ok for the insurance industry to write health care legislation or the oil industry to craft energy policy, how could weighing in on national standards and assessments possibly be out of bounds for Gates, which has no dog in the fight outside of its reputational capital?
Bring it.
Robert,
This is a rather silly idea from the Gates Foundation. Even if the standards are outstanding, so what? Schools have no reason to use anything from them unless the Foundation poured money into the school. And even they don’t have enough money to change enough schools to make a difference in public education.
A better idea would be for them to use their money to support applied research/development for specific subjects with the requirement that everything be published after the study was finished (e.g. fund a 5-year collaboration between districts/curricula developers/teaching consultants/educational analysts etc… with possible bonuses if the collaboration produces substantial improvements in learning).
Comment by Erin Johnson — November 12, 2008 @ 11:09 am
Just because you don’t see/remember complaints about lobbyists influencing policy and legislation doesn’t mean those complaints don’t exist.
That said, I have no problem with non-government groups trying to contribute honestly to education. The problem comes in when most of Gates’ previous leadership experience was over a company whose strategy was to buy their way into a market, then use their size to push their competitors around. The Gates Foundation might be the nicest, most altruistic non-profit ever, but it still carries the Gates name, and judging by the size of its endowment, it certainly has the capability to do the same things to education that Microsoft has done for years in the technology world.
Comment by Dave — November 12, 2008 @ 11:44 am
Per your remark, Dave, if there’s one thing the technology world understands, it’s standards. Not that the Foundation is populated by techies.
Erin, I understand and appreciate your skepticism about standards. It’s reasonable and well-argued. I don’t view standards as an end in itself. Like you, I see more value in curriculum than process standards. That said, what’s wrong with the idea of national assessments? If any idea seems well-established,. it’s the utter meaninglessness of state proficiency levels. It’s quite clear that states have lowered the bar rather than raised standards, when you compare state proficiency levels to NAEP. Where could the harm be in having a straight apples-to-apples nationwide test? My fifth graders in the Bronx take the same test as kids in L.A., Miami and Maine. Then we’ll have a clear basis for the kind of research you suggest, no?
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — November 12, 2008 @ 11:54 am
Robert,
We already have national assessments: NAEP. It does a great job of providing sunshine, if you will.
And yes, states have made a mockery of the word “proficiency” but really they are doing so in their own best interest. To not do so would mean that they would receive less money. This is one of the gravest faults of NCLB. The law should never have aligned money transfer with someone setting their own bar. The gaming of the system was quite predictable.
The states have lowered the bar not because they didn’t raise standards (most of them did). They lowered the bar because their students were not improving in learning. They could set the standards anywhere they would like, but if there isn’t a path towards improving student learning the bar is meaningless.
My concern with a national assessment is the same as the state assessments (but more so because it adds one more layer of beaurocracy). With most state assessments there is only some vague connection between the assessments and classroom instruction. This is because the assessments are designed for generalized learning and not directly tied to what is being taught to the students. For assessments to be of real value they must be directly tied to what students are learning in class and there must be some type of feedback loop telling us if the assessments are of high quality or measuring what we would like the children to learn. The assessments are as skill/process oriented as the standards. No content to be seen.
The biggest problem that our schools face is that there are no mechanisms for improving *anything*. How are the states/schools/feds supposed to improve standards? tests? curricula? teaching? (Keep going….)
Our schools are designed to perpetuate the status quo. It is therefore unsurprising that the status quo remains.
Comment by Erin Johnson — November 12, 2008 @ 12:46 pm
We may be doomed to disagree, Erin, but I would argue that NAEP isn’t effective at energizing change from parents for one simple reason: most kids don’t take it. But it’s not hard to imagine the parents at a school getting agitated if they suddenly see their kids’ school performing poorly compared to national averages. It’s clear and transparent.
My favoring of national assessments and curricula is also borne of pragmatism. Here are my articles of faith: Accountability matters. Accountability as currently practiced is broken. High stakes tests attached to funding create an incentive to narrow curriculum and cheat. Accountability that is subjective will be gamed. So where does this lead? One standard, one test, and a federal role that consists of reporting the data and letting the chips fall where they may. Then it’s up to states and localities to act on what they learn. Or explain why they can’t or won’t.
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — November 12, 2008 @ 12:57 pm
Robert, I believe that we have much in common. My thoughts stem largely from the colossal failure of standards to do anything to improve student learning. And it isn’t just the gaming of the system. Even if we take away the absurd statements of proficiency from the states, the real problem is that NCLB, the standards movement, testing and accountability has largely failed to improve student learning.
My pragmatic bottom line: Have these reforms actually improved our students’ education?
NAEP dosn’t have to be taken by every student to give an accurate reflection of average student learning. Clearly the NAEP has shown that there has been very little change in student learning over the past 30 years (despite waves and waves of “reforms”).
Parents getting agitated at schools matter very little. As much as we feel that schools should be responsive toward parent/student needs, they are not. The system is designed to minimize parental input.
Accountability can be very effective in the right system but the way our schools are structured all forms of “accountability” are worse than useless. The “accountability” measures let people feel as if they are improving schools without actually doing so. Even worse “accountability” has made schools even more conservative about what they teach, moving to a skill process education and taking what little content there was out of the curricula. With “accountability” has student learning improved?
It is not that accountability is broken. It is that we are holding the wrong people accountable to the wrong things. (e.g. who is holding the standards makers “accountable” for skill/process standards? who is holding the test makers “accountable” for thin, content-less tests? etc…)And we do that because our school system structure is ineffective and dysfunctional. We have this mistaken idea that teachers are lazy and if they are incentivized enough they will suddenly invent something new. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
An analogy if you will is this: With medical care, people go to a doctor/hospital to get better. If these type of “accountability” measures were applied to doctors/hospitals then we would be demanding doctors/hospitals come up with new and improved treatments on the spot, ask them to heal all their patients, do so in a safe manner, and reward them for just making patients better. “Just get the job done!” We would feel better because we were being tough on the doctors/hospitals, but in reality new medical breakthroughs would not be made.
Medical improvements are not made this way. We have an extensive system for inventing, developing and testing new improvements in medicine that lies outside the doctor’s office. Where is the comparable system for education?
Classroom instruction improvements, too, will never be made using these type of “accountability” measures.
Effective school systems (around the world) do use an accountability structure but none of those systems resemble in the least the “testing and accountability” done here. And certainly, none of those effective school systems place the entire burden of improving student learning on the backs of the teachers alone.
Our school system is not set up to improve. National tests, I fear, will be only one more way to document failure.
Comment by Erin Johnson — November 12, 2008 @ 2:52 pm
Robert,
With all due respect, I want to point out that your argument has a seriously flawed premise. You ask, “Perhaps I’m missing something, but industry lobbyists regularly play a role in policy and legislation where they have enormous self-interest with nary a peep. If it’s ok for the insurance industry to write health care legislation or the oil industry to craft energy policy, how could weighing in on national standards and assessments possibly be out of bounds for Gates…?”
The practice of having interested parties write their own legislation has faced enormous criticism from people who understand that simply because something is legal doesn’t make it right. It is legalized corruption and it has had a devastating effect on health care, the environment, the economy, and any number of other areas. Think of the outcry over Dick Cheney’s attempt to keep the meeting on energy policy secret. Just recently Alan Greenspan has been forced to express his “shocked disbelief” that financial industries couldn’t regulate themselves. I can assure you that millions of other people weren’t surprised in the least.
So, it isn’t true that these practices have developed without a peep, nor is it true that they have been successful. Why would we want to model educational policy on that?
Beyond that, America is supposed to be a democracy. Many of us feel that corporations have already encroached upon far too many areas which are appropriately the tasks of citizens.
Comment by Robert F — November 16, 2008 @ 5:24 pm
I’ll happily concede the point that the insurance industry shouldn’t be helping to regulate an industry in which it has an interest. I pointed it out not as a model, but an example. It makes no sense to take exception to “turn[ing] over the public’s interest in what is to be taught and learned to a private philanthropy” since we allow parties with vested interest to direct policy every day. But that overlooks my larger point: the Gates Foundation has no financial interest in national standards. So they are different than the example, and at the very worst, benign. And there’s every chance that they will craft something useful and beneficial.
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — November 16, 2008 @ 7:29 pm
Robert, There is no chance that they will craft something useful and beneficial. If they were of the right frame of mind to develop high quality standards they would be out promoting the Core Knowledge sequence for K-8 and something comparable for high school.
Even if on the off-chance they did craft something useful, the states would never adopt high quality standards. Content, knowledge, and ideas are too controversial. State boards have resorted to skill/process based standards because these are consitent with current educational thought and can pass the multiple committees that review the standards.
Perhaps you could consider their work to be benign, but every effort that does not result in improvements is a lost opportunity.
Given that the Gates Foundation’s effort at national standards is designed to fail (to improve public education), the best hope that our students have is that this effort will be big enough and garner enough attention that its failure will finally close the chapter on the “standards” movement as a means of improving our schools, much like their previous work on “small schools” has done.
Comment by Erin Johnson — November 16, 2008 @ 8:09 pm
No chance? That’s a little defeatist, Erin. Putting a man on the moon was hard. Curing polio was hard. Defeating Japan in WWII was REALLY hard. Deciding what body of knowledge we want schoolkids to learn? Not quite so hard. I mean think about it? Should all kids learn the three branches of government? Great. That’s social studies standard 1.1. Photosynthesis? OK, science standard 1.1. What else? Are you really going to suggest there’s anyone out there who DOESN’T want their child to learn these things? Sure it gets hard, but hard is not impossible.
I’m not going to speak for my colleagues at Core Knowledge, but I have a feeling if Gates called us and said we’d like to make the Core Knowledge curriculum the standard for elementary and middle school curriculum in the U.S., we’d all march to the unemployment office with big grins on our faces.
And make no mistake, I think that would be a victory. A national set of content standards, assessments based on those standards and NO stakes tests designed to measure where students are against those standards.
A heck of a lot easier than inventing the internet.
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — November 16, 2008 @ 8:18 pm
Robert, Changing people’s minds is infinitely more difficult than inventing the internet!
I, too, would be thrilled if the Gates Foundation supported CK. If nothing else, it would bring CK to the nation’s attention demonstrating what a high quality K-8 education should look like.
But all that being said, there is no possible way that national standards (developed by the Gates Foundation or otherwise) will improve student learning.
The problem with our schools is not that we/the public couldn’t get general agreement on a destination (what we would like our kids to know). National standards might be difficult but definitely possible. But it is an effort that is futile.
National standards are trying to solve the wrong problem. If the lack of standards had been the problem then at least some of the states should have shown improvements when they implemented standards at the state level. But those improvements did not happen.
The problem is that our children are not learning very much and our schools are not set up to improve any element of classroom instruction (curricula, teaching, assessments, etc…). So how would national standards ever translate into classroom practice?
There are only a few school systems around the world that enable their children to learn well (both disadvantaged and not). Not one of these systems uses a primary strategy of “national standards” and a “no stakes” assessment. So why does this idea have such traction when the evidence strongly suggests that national standards/no stakes testing has never worked to improve student learning?
Are you more interested in actually improving student learning or just in implementing national standards?
Comment by Erin Johnson — November 16, 2008 @ 9:15 pm
<<< Are you more interested in actually improving student learning or just in implementing national standards?
I do not now, nor have I ever understood what it means to improve student learning in the abstract. In order to successfully educate children, we need to first understand exactly what it is we expect them to learn.
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — November 16, 2008 @ 10:21 pm
You are of course right in that student learning is all very specific and not conducive to an abstract discussion.
But let’s go with any definition that you choose.
How do we implement that education into our classrooms?
Even if we had national standards and no stakes tests, teachers/schools/districts would have no vested interest in adopting those standards. Distant suggestions are easily ignored.
An easy example of this is math (probably the least controversial of all the subjects).
Say we adopted at the national level the A+ math standards compiled by William Schmidt of the top performing countries around the world. What then? You had a good link regarding the lack of preparation of current elementary teachers regarding math. Our country does not have a strong tradition of quality math teaching/curricula.
How would those teachers learn how to teach better? How would they learn what concepts are most important and how/when to introduce the concepts. The A+ math curricula has an underlying concept map foreign to US experience. Who would explain that concept map to teachers/curricula developers? Where would the new curricula come from? (Publishers are experts at explaining how their poor-quality materials actually satisfy high-quality standards.) Who would be responsible for ensuring that the assessments were aligned with the intent of the math standards? How would classroom instruction change and become better?
So yes, we could adopt national standards but the real work would be in setting up a school system that embraced the intent as well as the implementation of the standards.
Our schools lack any mechanism for improving *anything*. Without that structure in place, all distant reforms will not improve our schools.
Comment by Erin Johnson — November 16, 2008 @ 10:43 pm
I think you’re answering your own question, Erin, when you ask “How would those teachers learn how to teach better? How would they learn what concepts are most important and how/when to introduce the concepts. The A+ math curricula has an underlying concept map foreign to US experience. Who would explain that concept map to teachers/curricula developers?”
If there’s one thin we’re not lacking for in American education it’s support structures. Right now too much of ed school, professional development and other training is, er, lacking in rigor. Wouldn’t every support vehicle be more focused if it had something (like A+ math in your example) to focus its energies? Wouldn’t our entire education infrastructure work more sensibly with a shared set of outcomes?
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — November 16, 2008 @ 10:51 pm
Those “support structures” are anything but. Ed schools and prof. develop trainers have no vested interest in real children learning. To often they have their own pet/theoretical ideas that are impossible to translate into actual classroom environments. The “support” that they give schools is meaningless and usually runs the general/theoretical approach that may or may not apply to a classroom. How is this supposed to help out with teaching?
This is not the structure that effective school systems use to improve teaching, curricula and assessments.
To answer your question: If the school/teachers were committed to teaching the standards, the standards made sense, curricula was developed that reflected the intent and quality of the standards, the assessments were directly aligned with the exact program being taught in the classroom and there was timely, comprehensive feedback about the usefulness of each element towards improving student learning, then yes having a standards document may help the support to be more focused. But those are a lot of big ifs that don’t exist in our schools today.
One of the best examples of student learning improvements is from Singapore. Singapore is well known for its math performance, but its experience with beginning reading is much less publicized.
In 2001, Singapore scored just about average on the PIRLS (4th grade reading) and just slightly below the US as a whole. All students learn in English and 75% of the students do not speak English at home. The Singapore MOE decided to revamp their entire beginning reading program. They re-wrote their “standards” (more a syllabus than what we would consider standards), developed better materials, had training sessions that all teachers attended on the shift in teaching approach and the intent of the materials and provided support to the teachers during the implementation phase. The results: in 2006 the students had scored 30 points higher (4th country in the world, top country for English) while at the same time performance in the US fell 2 points. So why was Singapore able to improve their students’ reading performance so dramatically in 5 years while the US continues to stagnate?
Singapore (and other effective school systems) have structures in place to improve every critical element of student learning (teaching, curricula, assessments, and yes even the standards themselves). It is this school structure that is focused on self-improvement that is critical to becoming better that our schools greatly lack.
Setting up a self-improvement structure is not especially difficult. Effective organizations do this all the time. For any lasting/real improvements to be made in schools, these structures must be in place first.
Comment by Erin Johnson — November 16, 2008 @ 11:30 pm
An excellent argument for “improving student learning in the abstract” appears in Lawrence Lessig’s new book “Remix.” It does not address national education standards specifically, but it offers a concise framework for reconciling students’ inability to make academic sense of an overabundance of content with educators’ resistance to impose a canon on students. That strikes me as part of the philosophical dispute addressed here.
Lessig proposes that we are now in transition from an RO (“read-only”) culture and an RW (“read/write”) one. RO culture– books, movies, music, etc. that quote earlier works but do not allow the user to change the original work, like a read-only document–may not engage today’s students, who expect the right to respond to multimedia on their choice of platform in real time. Lessig cites a few researchers at USC who had great success with an alternate RW approach in a low-performing L.A. classroom. In this instance, the students rewrote reports of a local shooting in order to better document community reaction. The students, who were thrilled with the “progressive” approach, later complained that video alone was not enough to convey their emotions=-which kept them in school after hours begging for traditional English composition tutoring so they could write the rest. Lessig’s particular insight here (which is actually tangential to the rest of the book, which concerns how U.S. copyright law prevents these communal moments) is that RO and RW culture are not mutually exclusive. In fact, Lessig believes that promoting a “creative commons” for this kind of media exchange will lead students back to the traditional American canon, assuming it is available for free and for “remix” online.
I think many educators fear standards because they believe they restrict pedagogy, when in fact they are only meant to focus content. Instruction, after all, is easier to regulate than information itself. For teachers who have not thought broadly about their students’ media consumption or literacy, or for those who fear retribution from shortsighted bureaucrats, standards mean teaching by the book, which is no fun for anyone involved. That’s a personnel issue, though, not a testing one.
Comment by Ms. Miller — November 17, 2008 @ 12:29 am