Mike Smith says he ”somewhat skeptical” about national standards. A senior adviser to Ed Secretary Arne Duncan, who favors them, Smith gave the keynote at a Library of Congress Forum on American Education in the 21st Century Monday. Taking care to say he was speaking only for himself, not Duncan or President Obama, Smith noted his biggest concern is that “you can’t keep ideology or politics out of the ball game,” according to Ed Week’s Mary Ann Zehr at Curriculum Matters.
He put in the category of “weak” arguments the idea that the nation needs common standards because, as matters stand now, all 50 states set different proficiency levels. The argument is weak, he said, because the proficiency levels can be standardized. Another bad argument for common standards, he said, is that even though policymakers and educators acknowledge they don’t know much about what constitutes high-quality standards or assessments, they claim it would be beneficial to create a single, nationwide system.
But Smith also said standards could foster a common curriculum. “The potential to develop a common curriculum is the ‘core reason’ that he supports the advancement of common standards,” Zehr reports.
Read the rest on Mary Ann’s blog; Ed Week’s Politics K-12 also weighs in on Smiths “eyebrow-raising” speech.
Mike Smith knows Jack Squat. How could he, or anyone in the know about public education, go against Arne Duncan’s statement that, “It’s simply unacceptable for fifty states to be going in fifty different directions. (paraphrase)” The only positive note from Smith was that he sipulated he was speaking only for himself.
What would Mike say to all the parents from those states who simply don’t get it?
Too many states are currently administering “feel good” tests relative to the federal tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly referred to as the “nation’s report card.”
In 2005 Tennessee tested its eighth-grade students in math and found eighty-seven percent of students performed at or above proficient while the NAEP test indicated only 21 percent of Tennessee’s eighth graders proficient in math. In Mississippi, 89 percent of fourth graders performed at or above proficient on the state reading test, while only 18 percent demonstrated proficiency on the federal test. In Alabama 83 percent of fourth-grade students scored at or above proficient on the state’s reading test while only 22 percent were proficient on the NAEP test. In Georgia, 83 percent of eighth graders scored at or above proficient on the state reading test, compared with just 24 percent on the federal test.
Oklahoma, North Carolina, West Virginia, Nebraska, Colorado, Idaho, Virginia, and Texas were also found guilty in their determinations of proficient when compared to the federal NAEP test.
How could anyone possibly rationalize any of this nonsense???
I wasn’t there, and I’m relying only on Mary Ann’s reporting, but it sounds like Smith was sounding an appropriately cautious note about the difficulty of getting to national standards, not their overall merit (Checker Finn has likewise sounded variations on this theme) and I doubt he would disagree with you about the “feel good” tests, but would probably point out there are other routes to the same destination.
Here’s the rationalization, Mr. Hoss, (3/17, 7:14am): States function in a political environment where officials want to reassure the public that schools are doing OK. They hate giving the public bad news, so No-Child-Left-Behind allowed each state to set their own “standards” and they keep revising them until they “get it right”. That is, until they are satisfied the public will be happy. If the public is happy that 1+1=3, then that will be the “standard”. With higher and improving scores on the state tests, state officials won’t be embarrassed by having to answer tough questions. The result is a large disconnect between scores on state tests and the NAEP. It’s all about public perception, not educational soundness.
Why couldn’t the NAEP testing program in Reading and Math be expanded to test all kids in all states in 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th and 12th grades.
Currently they do 4th, 8th and 12th grades every two years. It would mean adding two grades (6th and 10th) and a more rigorous test schedule of yearly testing.
Is that too simple a solution?
To CodyPT: see my previous post in reply to Mr. Hoss.
The reason why your simple solution won’t work is “politics” once again. This is due to the philosophical differences between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats dislike national testing and Republicans dislike national standards. The compromise is to have states do some, but not all, NAEP testing to satisfy the Democrats and have the states make their own standards to satisfy the Republicans.
As I said in my previous post, it’s all about public perception, not educational soundness.
e. g. e.
There’s public perception, but then there’s also that pesky Constitutional issue. Setting content in Washington might actually be going too far.
But, for the most part, content doesn’t appear to be what the “standards” discussion really revolves around. It’s more about “cut scores,” or where each state sets the proficiency level. Every state could have identical content standards for identical grade levels and still develop assessments and set proficiency levels to arrive at the current levels of inconsistency.
When Fordham published recently their work about the Standards Illusion, with the clever little interactive that allowed you to see whether a proficient student in your state would be proficient in each of the other 49, as far as I can tell they were comparing via NAEP–in other words, equating each state’s cut score to the cut score for NAEP, and then back out again to the comparison state. I am not a statistician, but I am thinking that this kinda/sorta works assuming that content doesn’t vary a whole lot (or is largely irrelevant to what is being tested). If that is the case, one has to ask, what exactly would be the point of standardizing the standards (so to speak)?
There may be other good reasons (efficiency and cost-effectiveness of assessment, for instance)–but I don’t see a whole lot of conversation about them.
Settling content in Washington is too far indeed. We didn’t throw of the shackles of King George’s tyranny only have some new despot tell us our kids have to learn to simplify fractions. If someone’s going to force my child to simplify fractions, it’ll damn well be someone in my own sovereign state!
Robert–well, yeah, but that’s the federalist deal. I assume they taught you that in your state?
Which, Margo? Federalism or fractions? Forgive my sarcasm, but my simple-mindedness refuses to admit of the possibility that we cannot create a common curriculum that is equally valid in all fifty states, territories, possessions and Washington, DC. The argument that it’s too hard to reach agreement doesn’t cut it, especially since “too hard” is not seen as no excuse for things that are *truly* beyond us, like differentiating instruction for 24 kids at a time.
Robert:
I don’t think agreement is at all the issue. In fact, I suspect that there is more agreement across the fifty states (regarding content) that we currently admit. It’s just a question of whether Washington can be the one to lay it on us–under the Constitution as it stands.
What amazes me is that anyone thinks that consistent content or standards or testing across the states is going to produce some new, dramatic (or even slightly significant) difference in the education children get. It seems a pointless argument to me — intended to make people feel as if they’re talking about something important and helping them to avoid taking a close look at what happens when you institutionalize education and children.