Tag Archive for 'national standards'

Duncan Bangs the Drum for National Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 12, 2009 in Education News and accountability. 3 Comments

“If we accomplish one thing in the coming years,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said this week, “it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America.”  Speaking at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting , Duncan said.

I know that talking about standards can make people nervous—but the notion that we have fifty different goalposts is absolutely ridiculous. A high school diploma needs to mean something—no matter where it’s from. We need standards that are college-ready and career-ready, and benchmarked against challenging international standards. We also need to break the culture of blame in which colleges blame high schools and high schools blame grade schools and grade schools blame parents for our failures.

Duncan was specifically speaking of ”high school standards” in his remarks, but EdWeek’s David Hof notes his comments suggest ”he’ll be pushing the issue in any reauthorization [of NCLB] that happens under his watch.”  Duncan also talked up national standards in an interview with EdWeek’s Alyson Klein last week.

New York Times For National Standards and Tests

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 4, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Educational Policy. 5 Comments

The New York Times, echoing Petrilli, Finn and Hess, warns that Congress has to make sure the proposed economic stimulus package does not undermine education reform. “The money needs to be targeted in a way that forces the states to adopt reforms required under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002,” argues an editorial in this morning’s paper.  

Arne Duncan, the education secretary, has a burgeoning discretionary budget that can be used to reward those states that embrace reform and prod those states that continue to lag. Mr. Duncan’s main goal should be to replace a wildly uneven patchwork of standards with a coherent system of national standards and tests that would allow parents to know, at last, how their schools compare with schools elsewhere in the country.

A pretty high profile endorsement for a common sense reform.  Now, will someone please sit down with the editorial board of the Times and explain the difference between clear and coherent content standards and squishy skills or performance standards, before this turns into a case of be careful what you wish for?

KIPP Founders: National Standards Will Raise Achievement

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 9, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy and accountability. 5 Comments

Kipp founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin have an op-ed in the Washington Post today “how to channel Obama’s ‘yes, we can’ spirit into substantive education reform.”  Some of the pair’s five suggestions are pure bully pulpit stuff – inspiring Americans “to set a goal for our educational system akin to putting a man on the moon,” for example, and helping build enthusiasm and respect for teachers.  But the KIPPsters also issue a ringing call for national standards and assessments:

Perhaps the single greatest lever for raising expectations and achievement for all children in America would be the creation of national learning standards and assessments. With KIPP schools operating in 19 states, we have seen how the maze of state standards and tests keeps great teachers from sharing ideas, inhibits innovation, and prevents meaningful comparison of student, teacher and school performance. Rather than there being 50 different standards, Obama could unify the country around a common vision for the kind of teaching and learning we need to prepare our children for the future.

The pair also want Obama and Ed Secretary-designate Arne Duncan to back assessing teachers “on their demonstrated impact on student learning, not whether they hold a traditional teacher certifications,” and giving all public “the ability to hire, fire and reward principals and teachers based on their students’ progress and achievement.”

Ed Person of the Year #5: Gates Reboots

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 27, 2008 in Education News. 1 Comment

Until very recently, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s brand of school reform was largely associated with the small schools movement. They spent $2 billion turning big, “obsolete” high schools into smaller “learning communities.”  In November, faced with evidence of diminishing returns on the strategy, Gates hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and rebooted their efforts, shifting the focus to higher standards for college readiness and improving teacher quality.

“We must give the Gates Foundation and its founders credit for their honest self-scrutiny,” wrote Diane Ravitch on Forbes.com.  ”Most proponents of education reform defend their ideas against all critics, regardless of what evaluations show.”  In Fortune last month, Claudia Wallis summarized the Gates Foundation’s new direction, the goal of which is to double the number of low-income students earning a college degree by 2025.

The upshot is that Education 2.0 is bolder and more aggressive in its goals, and it involves even more intensive investment – $3 billion over the next five years. This time the focus isn’t on the structure of public high schools but on what’s inside the classrooms: the quality of the teaching and the relevance of the curriculum. It steers smack into some of the biggest controversies in American education – tying teacher tenure and salaries to performance, and setting national standards for what is taught and tested.

“One of the reasons to think that the Gates 2.0 plan will be more successful than version 1.0 is that the plan involves a commitment to measure results and follow the evidence rather than plow forward with a preconceived notion like ’small schools are better,” wrote Wallis. 

Lessons Learned

“We saw that there is a big difference between graduating from high school and being ready for college,” said Gates in a speech at the Foundation’s November announcement.  “In general, the places that demonstrated the strongest results tended to do many proven reforms well, all at once: they would create smaller schools, a longer day, better relationships—but they would also establish college-ready standards aligned with a rigorous curriculum, with the instructional tools to support it, effective teachers to teach it, and data systems to track the progress.”  The defining feature of a great education, said Gates, is what happens in the classroom. 

We’ve known about these huge differences in student achievement in different classrooms for at least 30 years. Unfortunately, it seems that the field doesn’t have a clear view on the characteristics of great teaching. Is it using one curriculum over another? Is it extra time after school? We don’t really know. But that’s what we have to find out if we’re going to not only recognize great teachers, but also take average teachers and help them become great teachers. I’m personally very intrigued by this question, and over the next few years I want to get deeply engaged in understanding this better. 

Curriculum advocates, who often feel marginalized in ed reform debates about purely structural issues, were also cheered to hear Gates say “I believe strongly in national standards. Countries that excel in math, for example, have a far more focused, common curriculum than the United States does.”  He also called for better use of data to drive instruction — and as the basis for merit pay.  Gates, however, took pains to display a nuanced take on the potentially divisive issue.

There are two extreme sides in this debate. According to the caricature, one side just wants to turn teachers into commissioned salesmen, so their whole salary is based on how much the scores improve. The other caricature says that teachers don’t want to be held accountable, so they will reject any system that ties pay to performance. In truth, designing an appropriate incentive system is difficult, but possible.  We believe in incentive systems, but we understand the concern that without the right design, they could seem arbitrary or incent the wrong things. They need to be transparent, they need to make sense, and teachers themselves need to see the benefits of the system and embrace them.

“The good news is that the Gates Foundation, with its vast resources, has pledged to devote its attention to what happens in the classroom,” concluded Diane Ravitch in her essay for Forbes.com.  “The first thing it will learn is that there are no quick fixes. If it targets its dollars wisely, exercises a measure of humility, and continues to evaluate its efforts rigorously, it can make a positive difference.”

Transparency is the New Accountability

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 17, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum and accountability. 2 Comments

A meme on the march:

“Republicans that want to kill No Child Left Behind in its entirety should also propose to eliminate its $25 billion or so dollars for k-12 education. If that sounds like a poison pill, here’s an idea: push for transparency, via national standards and tests, instead of “accountability” via the heavy hand of Washington.”  — Mike Petrilli, Fordham Foundation.

“A Republican education agenda should have three key elements: decentralization, transparency and parental empowerment.”  — Lance T. Izumi, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy

“The federal role should be to provide accurate information about student performance. It should be left to states and districts to devise sanctions and reforms.”  — Diane Ravitch

Gates Foundation Standards? Why Not?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 12, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy and accountability. 16 Comments

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.

KIPP Founder Supports National Standards and Assessments

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 9, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 5 Comments

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.

Marching Orders for the Next Ed Secretary

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 3, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

If we want to spur innovation in education, the Department of Education should act more like the National Institutes of Health.  So say Newark Mayor Cory Booker, venture capitalist John Doerr, and Ted Mitchell, chief executive of NewSchools Venture Fund in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece. 

“We need a new, results-driven mind-set at the Department of Education that will drive pure educational innovation and ’scale up’ proven experiments and novel ideas that work, the trio write.  ”The federal government stands in a unique position to meet these needs.” 

The evidence for making a national commitment to innovation in education is compelling. Today, many of the most promising solutions are emerging from entrepreneurial organizations that embrace freedom and accountability. Indeed, such social entrepreneurs represent a growing force. They have started nimble, typically nonprofit organizations that work in partnership with creative mayors and school superintendents.

They cite the examples of KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Green Dot and others as worthy of federal support.  Booker, Doerr and Mitchell want the next president to create a “Grow What Works” fund and a second fund to provide research and development money for promising early stage initiatives.  They also favor eliminating caps on the number of public charter schools allowed and “excessive restrictions on how teachers are trained and credentialed.”  They also call for national standards and tests — without actually using the words, prefering instead “a common set of standards” and “a national data infrastructure.”

Obama on Accountability, Vouchers and National Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 23, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

One of Barack Obama’s education chamberlains chatted up DC reporters today about the Senator’s education agenda.  According to Edweek’s David Hoff, Obama’s man Michael Johnston said “high standards and accountability are good. The level of funding and the quality of assessments aren’t.”  Obama “believes a federal accountability system could measure students’ reading and math skills while not narrowing the curriculum to those areas.”  Amen to that.  Details to follow?

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, also there, has issues with some of what he heard.  While Obama is opposed to school vouchers “in any context.” Petrilli wonders if ”that hard line will soften if Obama becomes president, particularly if he sends his own daughters to a private school once he moves to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Johnston, he notes, also ”wouldn’t say if Obama supports national standards and testing, though it was clear that Johnston sees the logic.” 

Testify!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 18, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

U.S. News“I know this is hard for you to hear Chairman Miller, but we need national standards and national assessments.”

- New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, testifying in Washington this week on what it would take to fix NCLB. (Thanks, A. Russo @ This Week in Education)

More: EdWeek’s David Hoff was there.