Tag Archive for 'standards'

Laws, Sausages, and National Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 9, 2009 in No category. 2 Comments

Jay Greene has a smart, sobering piece on national standards.  “People tend to be in favor of them when they imagine that they are the ones writing the standards,” he notes.  “But when everyone gets into the sausage-making that characterizes policy formulation, it generally becomes clear that no one is going to get what they want out of national standards.  What’s worse is that the resulting mess would be imposed on everyone.”

Jay also quotes Sandra Stotsky on the sausage-makers:

Instead of choosing nationally known scholars to chair and staff these committees–to assure us of the integrity and quality of the product–the NGA and the CCSSO have, for reasons best known to themselves,  treated the initiative as a private game of their own.  The NGA and the CCSSO haven’t even bothered to inform the public who is chairing these committees, who is on them, why they were chosen, what their credentials are, and why we should have any confidence whatsoever in what they come up with.

While not writing about national standards, Mark Bauerlein at the Chronicle of Higher Education might as well be in describing the inevitable conflicts and disappointments when it comes time to choose texts in curriculum meetings.

Traditionalists in the room want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas, and on various grounds of historical influence, civic inheritance, and aesthetic virtue they stick with a generally Eurocentric tradition.  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.

The result is satisfying to neither side, he notes.  ”There doesn’t seem to be any way out of the impasse,” which Bauerlein thinks “partly explains the rise of the skills’ movement in education circles.”

Align PreK and Elementary Ed Standards

Published by Alice Wiggins on April 22, 2009 in No category. 4 Comments

So far this week, I’ve discussed two ways to improve U.S. early childhood education—changing the way we evaluate preschools (and preschool teachers) and establishing clear and specific preschool learning standards.  The third item on my wish list is aligning preschool and elementary school standards.

Creating a seamless PreK to elementary school system is also the No. 1 item on the “to do” list of the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE).  In a paper titled Promoting Quality in PreK-Grade 3 Classrooms by Dr. Mariana Haynes, NASBE’s research director, argued for aligning not just standards, but curricula, assessment and teaching practices for Pre-K through grade three, to reflect what research tells us about learning environments on children’s developmental outcomes.  “This is an important foundational step to creating the infrastructure for a coherent, evidence-based early learning system,” Haynes wrote. “States may want to examine how to create incentives for school districts and early education providers to partner in building a seamless prekindergarten through grade three system,” she concluded.

A New America Foundation report by Kristie Kauerz also makes a strong argument for advancing the alignment of PK through grade 3. Lack of availability of high-quality preschool for all children (we’ll talk about this later this week!) coupled with the absence of alignment between PK and subsequent grades results in classes that include some children who have the background knowledge and academic gains for preschool and some children who do not. As a result, Kauerz notes “teacher must focus on those children who do not have the relevant and necessary cognitive or social skills, thereby being forced to slow and level down the curriculum and pedagogy in order not to leave behind less well prepared children.”  The result?  Children who arrived well prepared are often hindered in their continued progress.

Kauerz goes on to cite a study of elementary school in California that “analyzed why some schools score substantially better on the state’s academic performance index than other schools with similar students. Practices found to be associated with higher performance included school-wide instructional consistency within grades, curricular alignment from grade-to-grade, and classroom instruction guided by state academic standards (Williams, Kirst, & Haertel, 2005).”

It’s safe to say that one unambiguous victory of the standards-based education movement has been a general rise in expectations, especially in schools serving low-SES children.  Clear and specific preschool learning standards would ensure that children transition more smoothly to kindergarten bringing with them social skills and foundational skills and knowledge for ongoing educational achievement.  Aligning those standards with a state’s existing K-8 standards would be better still.

Test Curriculum, Not Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 18, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum and accountability. 0 Comments

One of President-elect Barack Obama’s education ideas is to “improve the assessments used to track student progress.” But improving the tests may be tougher than he appreciates ”and the problem may be rooted in the state standards themselves,” says UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham.  ”Most people underestimate how hard it is to write good test items that are based on state standards.”  Writing at Britannica Blog, Willingham notes:

If you want to assess what students know and can do, it is only reasonable to list your expectations. Make the expectations too broad and they do not help students, teachers, and parents understand what is expected. Make them too narrow and you invite teachers to teach the list of expectations at the expense of everything else.

“I don’t see how these problems can be avoided unless you make the expectations more comprehensive,” concludes Willingham.  “That is, instead of writing a list of standards, specify the expectations for contents and skills in more detail—in short, base tests on a curriculum.  A curriculum would differ from a list of standards because it would include both the broad conceptual ideas and the specific content, and it would describe how the abstract concepts relate to the specific content.”

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. sounded a similar call early this year in a cover story in the American Educator, which argued that reading tests should contain passages about specific topics taught not just in literature, but in all other subjects taught in that grade.  It makes all the sense in the world, for the reasons Dan Willingham describes.

A Progressive Educator Learns to Love Core Knowledge

Published by John Thompson on August 5, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Essay and Teaching. 0 Comments

Long before I began teaching, I carried on a silent debate with Al Shanker and his “Where We Stand” column. I seethed when he recounted the common question—”is it on the test?”—and then dignified the mindset that produced such a juvenile question. Like so many liberals, my educational philosophy was a hybrid between Dewey’s (and the 1960s’) progressivism and the heroic fantasy created by Hollywood of the charismatic teacher who transforms students by the power of personality and hope. Shanker, however, did convince me that standards were politically necessary and maybe they were educationally valid.

I read Hirsch with the wisdom of half of a decade in the classroom, and I rejected his approach completely… Hirsch sounded too much like a fact-driven traditionalist. He sounded too much like a testing advocate.

My rookie year in an alternative school for felons was a perfect proving ground for my ideals. Our two teachers and our two social workers functioned interchangeably like linebackers in the old “3-4-4″ defense. Class and counseling were recognizably different at times, but mostly we worked seamlessly as student-centered teams. Anytime I wanted adjust my lesson plans, I would dismiss our Social Studies class, and notify the kids that we are now in Science class. And the students were free to do the same. When an emotionally disturbed student barged into class one morning in a particularly agitated state, he directed me, “John, teach me something.” “OK, I replied, today we are studying Psychology,” and I provided a simplified version of autonomic functioning, habit, and choice. The student then scribbled a diary of the day’s thoughts, categorizing them as “auto” and “congo,” which were his spellings of automatic and conscious, and habit. It would have made a great scene on The Wire.

Even as I congratulated myself for my innovative lessons, I started to recognize the impossibility of making the “bricks” of great ideas without the “straw” of information. When I moved to a regular high school, I saw that most of my students had almost no recall from their previous classes. An A.P. student answered that Vietnam was the war we won after dropping the atomic bomb. And it got worse from there.

Continue reading ‘A Progressive Educator Learns to Love Core Knowledge’

What If They Gave a Test and No One Came?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 4, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy and Opinion. 0 Comments

New York SunBack during the Vietnam War, “What if they gave a war and no one came” was a popular anti-war slogan. I was thinking about that in the run-up to the New York State ELA tests here in New York City. The pressure over standardized tests is enormous everywhere, but it seems especially acute here in the Big Apple, where the mayor and chancellor have made it a cornerstone of their reforms. A piece by yours truly in this morning’s New York Sun wonders out loud what might happen if parents in New York, who are clearly fed up with testing, decided to keep their kids home from school the day of the test.

As a teacher, I never had a problem with standardized tests. I still don’t. If you don’t want to be held accountable, you’re probably in the wrong line of work. The problem, obviously, is not the test but test prep. One of my graduate students last year, a first year Teach for America corps member, told me that her school mandated two-hours of test prep a day starting the first week of school. Clearly this level of anxiety is counterproductive. It’s not reasonable to place enormous consequences on a test and then expect a school to conduct itself as if this Sword of Damocles isn’t hanging over its head. If we want children to have a well-rounded, content-rich education it’s simply not going to happen (especially in high-poverty, low-performing schools such as the one where I worked) with the existing prep-and-test strategy.

What to do? In a previous piece in the NY Sun, I argued for random testing. If schools didn’t know when they would be tested, the grade or even the subject matter — reading, science, math, etc. — the only way to produce a good result would be (mirabile dictu!) to educate children. One of the interesting issues going forward in ed reform, I think, is how to preserve accountability, which is necessary and good, without turning the accountability measure into one’s sole and exclusive reason for getting out of bed each morning.

Got a better idea? Love to hear it.

America the Stupid

Published by CKF on May 5, 2007 in Curriculum, Educational Policy, Opinion and Podcast and Video. 0 Comments

YouTubeAn amusing criticism of the ignorance of Americans, posted by “Web Pundit” on YouTube, who identifies himself as an ex-teacher.

He offers a link to the Core Knowledge website, and promotes the Core Knowledge curriculum.

Please note that this is intended as a humorous, but scathing critique; we are offering it for those readers who will enjoy this sort of video. The views expressed are those of the author, and not of the Core Knowledge Foundation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaN6Rx8X6_I

Where on Earth can you take a geography class?

Published by CKF on April 26, 2007 in Curriculum. 0 Comments

Orlando SentinelStudents learn the subject in other countries, but most American public schools don’t teach it — except as part of history and social studies.

Shradhha Sharma | Columbia News Service

Ten years ago at a convention in Baltimore, fifth-grade history teacher Lydia Lewis met someone she described as a “bright, college-educated young woman in her 20s.” Lewis was busily reviewing her notes for a slide presentation on geography when she felt someone tapping her on the shoulder.

Turning around, she saw the young woman standing there, a quizzical expression on her face. In her hand was a slide depicting a map of the United States. She held it upside down so that Florida was in the north and asked Lewis innocently, “Ma’am, which way does this slide go in?”

“I was completely shocked,” Lewis recalls. “But being a teacher, I thought this was one of those teachable moments so I started to explain to her the right way to look at the map. But she simply wasn’t interested.”

As teachers across the country try to help their students meet test-score standards mandated by law, there is one subject that has been left behind: geography.

Read the complete article

Inconvenient Truth At School

Published by CKF on February 9, 2007 in Assessment and Testing and Curriculum. 0 Comments

New York Sunby Andrew Wolf

… Some years back, the reporting of the results of the common standardized tests was altered, not to show the average achievement of students in a school or a district, but to determine the percentage achieving or exceeding something called “grade level,” a measure of minimal competence. By this gauge, the child who is barely getting by, meeting this minimal standard counts equally with the super-star prodigy pondering quantum physics.

… Is it any wonder that instruction has been dumbed down in American schools, when educrats are rewarded and honored not for bringing more children to the top, but for nudging more over some contrived midpoint of mediocrity?

… Math is not the only area impacted by this “march to the middle.” Content area instruction has carefully been removed from American classrooms, a phenomenon that a University of Virginia professor named E.D. Hirsch Jr. noticed decades ago. Mr. Hirsch has come up with a real-world solution — a content-rich back-to-basics curriculum called Core Knowledge that is winning favor with schools and parents across the country.

Read the complete articleÂ

Core Convictions: An interview with E.D. Hirsch

Published by CKF on September 26, 2006 in Curriculum, Education Theory, Educational Policy and Interview. 0 Comments

Education SectorE.D. Hirsch, Jr., a slightly awkward man with a quick smile, seems an unlikely combatant in the culture wars. Once best known in academic circles as a literary critic, author, English professor, and scholar of hermeneutics, the theory and methodology of interpretation of texts, Hirsch was catapulted to the center of the culture debate with the publication of his 1987 book Cultural Literacy (Houghton Mifflin).

Since then, Hirsch has become a lightning rod for criticism from multiculturalists in the academy. Said Harvard professor Howard Gardner in 1997: “[Hirsch] has swallowed a neoconservative caricature of contemporary American education. If this kind of angry, stereotypical thinking is what results from a ‘core knowledge’ orientation, then I want no part of it.” But Hirsch’s supporters, including national organizations such as the American Federation of Teachers, argue that his work espousing a coherent and content-rich curriculum for American students has been an indispensable part of school improvement.

Hirsch is professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia and the founder and chairman of the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation, an organization dedicated to excellence and fairness in early education. The organization conducts curriculum research, develops materials for parents and teachers and offers professional development to help elementary and middle schools deliver a solid, specific and shared core curriculum that enables children to develop strong foundations of knowledge.

… In May, 2006, Education Sector Co-director Andrew J. Rotherham sat down with Hirsch in Charlottesville, Virginia, to talk about his new book, the links between his work in education and literary scholarship, school choice, the standards movement, and the politics of education.

Read the complete interview