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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.