Ed Week’s David Hoff broke a significant piece of news over at NCLB: Act II the other day. At the National Governors Association’s meeting last weekend members approved a policy statement that could lead to national education standards:
The statement hasn’t been released to the public yet. But governors told me that it advocates putting state leaders in charge of a national effort to establish a “common core” of standards defining what students should know. The statement dovetails with the report released in December by the NGA, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve Inc., a group of governors and business leaders. That report called for a process of benchmarking the standards of high-achieving countries to determine what content they consider most important.
Hoff sees the stament as newsworthy because “it adds momentum to the move toward national standards” and notes it “sailed through the NGA without any controversy or significant debate.” Fordham’s Flypaper thinks Hoff’s exclusive would have been front-page news were it not for the economy. “Think about it,” says Mike Petrilli, “the governors are open to throwing out their own standards—the heart of their education accountability systems—in favor of frameworks that would have reach from coast to coast. This is a big deal!”
I understand from Prof. Roger Schank that the source of the current list of subjects that are taught today in American schools was first proposed by the President of Harvard back in the 1890s as a guide to schools for what Harvard was looking for in aspiring applicants – mostly for the clergy. That was what gentlemen studied who did not want to go into business or medicine or the military. And of course everyone wanted to go to Harvard.
I personally have experienced a huge disconnect between what I was told was important to know in school and what I discovered I needed to know to make it in the world after I graduated but addressing that issue is not what national standards are about. Having one national standard is about a single standard to measure how well teachers teach, not about what they teach. Coming up with content everyone is obliged to teach still does not address how to teach it effectively so kids learn it, whatever it is.
To address that issue, I invite anyone and everyone in the teaching field to go to http://www.adihome.org, scroll down and watch “Closing the Performance Gap”, the story of how one superintendent transformed his school district using Direct Instruction. Yes, he did. “Yes we can.”