Tag Archive for 'NGA'

Why Standards Aren’t Sticky

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 25, 2009 in Education Practice and Literacy. 14 Comments

In his 2007 book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Stanford business professor Chip Heath describes why some bad ideas such as urban legends and misleading bits of conventional wisdom are “sticky” and gain traction, while some very good ideas don’t make it through the clutter.   Early in the book, Heath describes how the Army used to invest enormous time in planning military operations that turned out to be useless for an obvious reason:  the enemy doesn’t follow the plan.  The answer, developed in the 1980s, is a planning concept called Commander’s Intent (CI).

CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation.  At high levels of the Army, the CI may be relatively abstract: ‘Break the will of the enemy in the Southeast region.’ At the tactical level, for colonels and captains, it is much more concrete…The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events.

 “Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders,” Heath writes. “When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed in arriving there.”  Right about now, you’re probably thinking, Hey!  That’s just like those voluntary national standards they’re cooking up! Brilliant! 

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

Standards might work just as well as “CI” if there was a shared understanding and deep experience with the tactics needed to achieve the desired results—if our understanding of how to teach reading were as simple and straightforward as determining the range of a piece of artillery.  The problem in education is that it is possible – nearly certain, in fact – to follow “Commander’s Intent” yet still fail miserably.  The draft reading standards put up for public comment this week by the Common Core State Standards Initiative can’t “stick” because they are built on a flawed model of reading as a transferable skill.  By promoting even tacitly the idea the we can teach reading independent of content (decoding + reading strategies = the ability to comprehend everything), the standards offer little useful guidance for teachers, virtually ensuring that even these “fewer, clearer” directions will not be met.  Only by describing specific texts and content across disciplines (making clear that comprehension equals background knowledge) with assessments aligned with those texts and content, can there be any hope of measuarable progress. 

Let’s be blunt:  Find one single teacher drawing breath that needed a secretive committee of two dozen experts to tell her that high school students ought to be able to “discern the most important ideas, events, or information, and summarize them accurately and concisely.”  This is not a standard, it’s a platitude.  As a goal or statement of purpose, it offers as much guidance and direction as military orders to “win the war.”   We do not lack clarity on our goals.  We lack clarity on how to achieve them.  The draft of the voluntary standards promotes tacitly the same flawed concepts that have driven reading instruction for decades. 

Worst of all, the standards movement as currently conceived threatens to make matters worse by sending the message that there is now absolute clarity on what is to be taught in the nation’s schools.  That, of course, is not what standards do.  That would require not national standards, but a national curriculum.  They are the same thing in the public imagination.  This predictable confusion between standards and curriculum, strategies and tactics, already colors everything from the political attractiveness of merit pay to the anger at teachers for our failing education system.  Many education policies assume teachers know exactly how to teach every child to read well but fail to do so out of incompetence, laziness, or refusal to execute the Commander’s Intent.  The reality is infinitely more complex.

 As written, our vague, insubstantial voluntary national standards are not “made to stick.”  In fact, they are virtually guaranteed to have exactly the unintended results.  By refusing to specify content to be taught, they will perversely encourage bad practice—teaching reading as a skill rather than a function of background knowledge.  In the absence of clear guidance, we will have more unnecessary and pointless reading strategy instruction, more test prep, more focus on reading as a transferrable skill.  And less–much less–of what actually creates competent readers—a well-rounded, content-driven, robust core curriculum.

President Obama’s Standards-Based Speech

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 8, 2009 in Curriculum, Education News and Opinion. 9 Comments

If there’s a bright side to the past week’s uproar over President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren it’s this: when was the last time we had a robust national debate about what our kids actually do in school?  A Niagara of ink was spilled debating whether the speech and a set of recommended classroom activities represented political propaganda, indoctrination or an abuse of presidential power.  But here’s an overlooked, yet indisputably accurate description of Obama’s speech and those controversial lesson plans: 

“Standards-based.”

The draft national standards in reading, writing, speaking and listening worked up by National Governors Associations (NGA) and The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), specify only the skills our children should be able to demonstrate.  Whether President Obama and the Department of Education realize it or not, they are revealing exactly how empty and meaningless these “standards” are as currently written.  For example, in order to be “college and career ready,” the draft standards hold that students must be able to “listen to complex information and understand what was said, identifying main ideas and supporting details.”  This is a standard you can apply to today’s speech by President Obama, a Glenn Beck talk show rant, the films of Michael Moore, or the conspiratorial ravings of the 9/11 “truth” movement.   So while conservatives can rest assured that Obama’s speech to schoolchildren will not be a part of the emerging national standards, neither is Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech, Lincoln’s second inaugural address or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.   In fact, no speech, book, poem or play is required.  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all speeches are created equal. 

But wait a minute, you might be thinking, “isn’t that what national standards are supposed to do?  Doesn’t it mean that kids from Maine to Montana are learning the same thing?”  No, that’s what a national curriculum would do.   It’s become distressingly clear that even people in education who should know better use the terms “standards” and “curriculum” interchangeably.  Yong Zhao, a distinguished professor of education at Michigan State University wrote in the Detroit Free Press last week that national standards “stifle creativity and reduce diversity of talents by instilling a single view of worthwhile knowledge” thereby doing “irreversible damage” to American education.  There are many criticisms one can level at the national standards movement.  That’s not one of them.

What conservative critics like Beck, Michelle Malkin and others might have focused on but did not is that the Administration’s suggested activities meet literally every one of the draft common core standards.  In order to be “college and career ready” students should be able to “sustain focus on a specific topic or argument through careful presentation of essential content;” “support and illustrate arguments and explanations with relevant details and examples;” and “represent and cite accurately the data, conclusions and opinions of others” among other skills.  Even the “inartfully worded” suggestion, that students ”write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president” is not in conflict with such standards. 

This is the dilemma of process standards:  they are aggressively, adamantly agnostic on the content of a good education.  Anything goes.  What speeches and texts are important to know?  Right now, the official answer is “none.”   Perhaps that’s a silver lining in this otherwise strange and irritating controversy that has greeted the President’s speech to school children.  If you don’t think that listening and responding to a Presidential address is a productive use of school time, the question you need to address is, “What exactly do you think your child should be reading and listening to all day?”

It’s a debate that is worth having.  At present, 46 states and the District of Columbia are close to answering the question “What should children learn in school” with “whatever.”    If you don’t think “whatever” is a good or helpful answer, then your choices quickly narrow to two:  You can fight to define what is (or is not) the appropriate content of a sound, well-rounded public education.  Or you can keep your child home every time he or she is assigned a text that you don’t like.

Update: Jay Greene comes at this from a similar angle.  “Parents sense a lack of control over what their children are taught in school,” he notes. “This is as true of every day’s social studies lesson as it is of Obama’s speech.”

Grammar and Syntax Standards?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 23, 2009 in Humor. 17 Comments

The “premature” release of the draft national standards on this blog yesterday prompted the National Governors Association to officially release the document today–along with the following statement:

STATEMENT FROM NGA: 
As some of you may be aware, the first working draft of the college and career-ready standards were prematurely released. NGA and CCSSO had hoped to incorporate feedback from states and other experts before releasing a working draft so that we can ensure the best common core possible. 

Sorry about that, er, premature…..wait a second……ummmmm……Hey, shouldn’t that read “was prematurely released?”  The first working draft were prematurely released??  

Ouch.  Any English teachers working on those grammar and syntax standards?

“Clear Guidance and Examples”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 23, 2009 in Curriculum and Education News. 3 Comments

Reports of the death of the national standards movement are greatly exaggerated, notes Common Core’s Lynne Munson.  ” This effort is too coordinated, too strategically smart, and has too much momentum to be dismissed out of hand,” she writes on the group’s blog, and I accept her criticism as valid and essentially correct.  To pronounce them D.O.A. was clearly a bit of impulsive hyperbole on my part.  Lynne’s critique of the draft standards is also spot-on:

As they are currently written the “Common Core” ELA standards are poised to repeat NCLB’s mistakes. NCLB has failed to increase reading achievement in any sustained way because it has approached reading purely as a skill and driven the study of literature and other core subjects from the classroom. The current draft of the ELA standards also overlooks the key role that substantial content plays in teaching students to read.

“NGA and CCSSO clearly want their effort to be successful,” she observes.  “This means providing clear guidance and examples of the kind of novels, non-fiction works, poems, and plays that students should read. That is undoubtedly the advice many of the effort’s feedback reviewers—and the larger public—will provide.”

On this Lynne and I may part company at least somewhat.  Getting that feedback and acting upon it are very different matters. It seems we’ve had many decades of calls for detailed content and a national curriculum — yes, curriculum — going largely unheeded.  The reluctance to codify any texts or works of literature as worth reading or even being familiar with betrays a strong (and standard) anti-curriculum bias and a fatally-flawed concept of reading comprehension that needs to be aggressively, adamantly pushed back against.

Does this mean national standards won’t be successful?  That othing less than a National Reading List and orders that every student must read every work on the list will do?  Of course not.  But (I like Lynne’s phrase) “clear guidance and examples” — the kind of information that teachers can use to create lessons, that test-writers can use to select reading passages, and parents can use to effectively use to know if their kids are where they need to be–is essential.   

The writers of the draft standard got one big thing right:  “The literary and informational texts chosen should be rich in content,” they note.  “This includes texts that have broad resonance and are referred to and quoted often, such as influential political documents, foundational literary works, and seminal historical and scientific texts.”

Amen to that.  But we cannot be content for fate, chance, circumstance or caprice to decide what those rich texts are.  It takes a little bravery — but only a little — to take the next step and offer “clear guidance and examples.”

Voluntary National Standards Dead on Arrival

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 22, 2009 in No category. 21 Comments

A draft of the newly developed common core state standards purports to offer “sufficient guidance and clarity so that they are teachable, learnable and measurable,” however the ELA guidelines offer almost no specific content and little that would be of use to teachers in planning lessons–or parents in understanding what their child is expected to know.

Copies of the draft, an effort spearheaded by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA) have begun circulating among reviewers.  A copy found its way to me without any restrictions on its use or circulation.  I have posted the draft document here.  (Trouble with the link?  Try here instead)

The draft insists that the voluntary standards be “coherent” but defines coherence to mean they “should convey a unified vision of the big ideas and supporting concepts within a discipline and reflect a progression of learning that is meaningful and appropriate.”  Framed as a series of benchmarks students must reach “to be college and career ready,” the draft enumerates standards such as the ability to “determine what text says explicitly and use evidence within text to infer what is implied by or follows logically from the text.”

To put this as blandly as possible, this is neither a revelatory insight nor a meaningful standard.  Educators hoping for guidance on what particular texts are expected to be taught, or how to get students to reach the bland and obvious standards will be disappointed.  On specific “texts” the draft says merely:

The literary and informational texts chosen should be rich in content….This includes texts that have broad resonance and are referred to and quoted often, such as influential political documents, foundational literary works, and seminal historical and scientific texts.

“At first glance, these language standards are, despite the brave descriptors, very similar to the dysfunctional state standards already in place,” notes Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr.  “Like most state standards, they naively take a formalistic approach to language ability.   They assume that the ability to understand literary and informational language is chiefly a how–to skill, whereas it is chiefly a topic-dependent skill that varies with specific topic familiarity.”   

 A sample scientific text on covalent bonds in the draft document, Hirsch notes, is a “a good illustration of this general point.  Will it be more useful for understanding such texts to spend class time teaching some will-o-the-wisp language proficiency or to impart a good general education in science and the humanities?  

“One begins to despair,” Hirsch concludes.

A Place at the Standards Table for Content?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 2, 2009 in Curriculum and Educational Policy. 18 Comments

One of the early criticisms of the emerging “Common Core standards” initiative has been the question of who is writing them–and who isn’t.  The groups behind the multi-state effort, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, have set up a website that includes a list of the individuals working on math and English standards. As Edweek notes the list is “dominated by three organizations:” Achieve Inc., the College Board, and ACT Inc.

What’s new and interesting is the announcement of a pair of “Feedback Groups,” to offer expert input on the draft standards, which are due at the end of this month.  “Final decisions regarding the common core standards document will be made by the Standards Development Work Group,” notes the NGA announcement. “The Feedback Group will play an advisory role, not a decision-making role in the process.”

If you believe that content matters as much as process in crafting standards–that any attempt to write national standards should outline the specific material to be covered, not just describe the skills children should master–then the inclusion of Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein is a welcome name among the members of the English-language Arts Feedback Group, along with Fordham’s Checker Finn.  Bauerlein, author of the best-seller The Dumbest Generation, has been a consistent voice in favor of cultural literacy and teaching broad background knowledge.  Ironically, he may have presaged the debate he’ll find himself drawn into when he wrote recently about the difficulty of reaching consensus in college curriculum meetings.  Traditionalists, he observed, ”want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas….Progressivists want to enlarge the canon and contexts, to give representation to other cultures and identities, and explode the reigning ‘normativities,’ and they resist a core knowledge of any kind being set down as official.”

There doesn’t seem to be any way out of the impasse, however, which I think partly explains the rise of the “skills” movement in education circles. What the skills emphasis does is neutralize the culture-wars conflicts inherent in any knowledge selections in a curriculum. It speaks about abstract cognitive abilities such as “critical thinking,” “higher-order thinking skills,” and “problem solving.” No disturbing questions about representation of female authors on a syllabus or about Thomas Jefferson’s racial attitudes. Instead, the skills approach promises to empower students to handle those questions better later on — not here in the classroom, but after they have graduated from the skills curriculum.

Whether the feedback process is genuine or merely a way to blunt criticism remains to be seen, of course.  For now, the entire enterprise can be viewed with guarded optimism–the willing suspension of disbelief that anything of use will emerge.