Classroom Practices That Need to Be Reconsidered

by Robert Pondiscio
January 19th, 2012

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Posted in Teaching | 36 Comments »

Teaching ideas whose time has come…and gone? Courtesy of yours truly and Alice Wiggins, who oversees the Core Knowledge Foundation’s Schools Department, here are common classroom practices that need to go away, be rethought, or curtailed:

1.      Data Driven…What?

An increasingly common feature in classrooms are data walls—bright, cheerful displays that show if students are advanced, proficient, basic or below basic in ELA and math.  As Rick Hess has written, schools have gone from not using data to inform decision making, to using data in half-baked or simplistic ways. Displaying decontextualized data is a prime example.  What exactly do we expect a third-grader to do with the knowledge that he or she is “approaching proficiency” in reading?  If data isn’t being used to drive instruction thoughtfully, what’s the point?

2.      Fiction Only Read-alouds

Fortunately, very few elementary school teachers need to be sold on the benefits of read-alouds.  They’re great for language development and exposing kids to rich vocabulary, since a child’s ability to read with comprehension doesn’t catch up with listening comprehension until about 8th grade. But if teachers aren’t devoting significant class time to nonfiction readalouds, they’re missing out on a golden opportunity to build background knowledge, which is essential for reading comprehension.

3.      Dumb Test Prep

Decrying test prep as a misuse of class time is a little like complaining that your kids are watching Fear Factor when they could be reading Chaucer. It’s true, but it’s not likely to change anytime soon.  But if we have to waste devote precious class time to test prep, let’s stop trying to teach and reinforce decontextualized reading skills like making inferences and finding the main idea that are content-specific, and cannot be mastered in the abstract.  More effective might be what Dan Willingham calls practice that reinforces the basic skills required for the learning of more advanced skills, protects against forgetting, and improves transfer.

4.      Reciting Lesson Aim and Standard

There’s nothing wrong with standards for planning and focusing lessons.  However, the idea of standards-based instruction is often misinterpreted.  Sure, students should be introduced to what they are about to learn, but having kindergarteners recite, “Through this lesson I will develop phonemic awareness and understanding of alphabetic principles” does nothing to support attainment of this standard or develop these students reading achievement.  In other cases, rather than using the standards to guide instruction on meaningful content, the standards become the instruction. Neither practice is an effective use of limited instructional time.

5.      Overusing Teaching Strategies

Too many classrooms seem to function on the principal that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.  Group work and differentiated instruction are two prime examples.  In Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov writes that group work is “as likely to yield discussions of last night’s episode of American Idol as it is higher-order discussions of content.”  Asking frequent, targeted, rigorous questions of students, Lemov believes, “is a powerful and much simpler tool for differentiating.”  Too many classroom practices are used based on a compliance mentality—students are in groups because “that’s what administration wants to see”—rather that because it makes sense for a particular unit, lesson or activity.  Like using data to drive instruction rather than as bulletin board fodder (see above) there needs to be a sound instructional strategy underlying pedagogical choices.  And let’s not even talk about learning styles.

6.      The “Theme of the Month”

It’s standard practice to organize instruction by “themes,” such as holidays, seasons, my neighborhood or foods of the world, for example.  Organize units around knowledge “domains” instead.  A teacher might use the theme “Our Great Big World” in kindergarten to invite children to explore the setting of a story.  But since every story has a setting, that “theme” is arbitrary and doesn’t coherently build background knowledge.  A domain-based approach to “Our Great Big World” might include teaching children about continents, countries, climates and land forms in a coherent fashion.

7.      Reading Comprehension Skills

We can’t say it enough and Dan Willingham said it best:  Teaching content is teaching reading.  The most overused tool in the box in elementary school is reading strategies.  Yes, there are benefits to reading strategies, but there’s no evidence that repeated practice yields additional benefits.  Comprehension typically breaks down and test scores plummet because of a lack of background knowledge, not because kids have failed to master reading strategies.

Innovate or Imitate?

by Robert Pondiscio
December 6th, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy | 24 Comments »

If education is a test, America might want to spend a little more time copying the answers the other countries are writing down on their papers.

Writing in at The Atlantic, Marc Tucker notes that despite spending “more per student on K-12 education than any other nation except Luxembourg” America continues to lag not just developed nations like Japan, Finland, Canada, “but developing countries and mega-cities such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.”

“You would think that, being far behind our competitors, we would be looking hard at how they are managing to outperform us. But many policymakers, business leaders, educators and advocates are not interested. Instead, they are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.”

Tucker’s list of “unproven solutions” includes charter schools, private school vouchers, entrepreneurial innovations, grade-by-grade testing, diminished teachers’ unions, and basing teachers’ pay on how their students do on standardized tests. These strategies are “nowhere to be found in the arsenal of strategies used by the top-performing nations,” he writes. “And almost everything these countries are doing to redesign their education systems, we’re not doing,” notes Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

“They develop world-class academic standards for their students, a curriculum to match the standards, and high-quality exams and instructional materials based on that curriculum. In the U.S., most states have recently adopted Common Core State Standards in English and math, which is a good start. But we still have a long way to go to build a coherent, powerful instructional system that all teachers can use throughout the whole curriculum.”

The top performers also raise entry standards for the teaching profession and insist that all teachers have in-depth knowledge of the subjects they will teach” and generally make teaching a high-status profession.

“The result is a virtuous cycle: teaching ranks as one of the most attractive professions, which means no teacher shortages and no need to waive high licensing standards. That translates into top-notch teaching forces and the world’s highest student achievement. All of this makes the teaching profession even more attractive, leading to higher salaries, even greater prestige, and even more professional autonomy. The end results are even better teachers and even higher student performance.”

The cycle in the U.S., Tucker notes, is the opposite of virtuous.  Teaching is a low-status profession, lacking in prestige and colleges of education set a low bar for admissions.  Salaries are low.  Teachers also have weak knowledge of their assigned subjects “and increasingly, they’re allowed to become teachers after only weeks of training,” he notes. “When we are short on teachers, we waive our already-low standards, something the high-performing countries would never dream of doing.”

The inevitable result is ever lower student achievement, which drives more attacks on teaching and stricter accountability, which Tucker wisely observes, makes it “even less likely that our best and brightest will become teachers.”

But hey, we can innovate and disrupt with the best of them!

The problem, Tucker concludes, is not a lack of innovation but a simple lack of what successful countries have: “a coherent, well-designed state systems of education that would allow us to scale up our many pockets of innovation and deliver a high-quality education to all our students.”

An Inconvenient Truth About Teacher Quality

by Robert Pondiscio
December 5th, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Education Practice, Literacy, Teaching | 11 Comments »

If teacher quality is the most important school-based factor in student outcomes, then why are math scores rising, while reading scores stay flat?  Do we just happen to have really good math teachers and really lousy reading teachers?  That can’t be: in the case of 4th grade teachers, the exact same teachers are responsible for both subjects.

Or maybe it’s not the teachers. Could it be the curriculum?

That’s the question posed by Dan Willingham and David Grismer in an op-ed in the New York Daily News this morning.  They point out intriguing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that has been hiding in plain sight:

“Reading scores over the last 20 years have been flat. But in math, scores have increased markedly. A fourth-grader at the 50th percentile in 1990 would score at about the 25th percentile compared to the kids taking the test in 2009. That’s an enormous improvement.

“This raises an uncomfortable question for teacher quality advocates: If teachers are so vitally important, why have fourth-grade math scores dramatically improved, but reading scores have flatlined, given that — at least at the elementary level — the same teachers are responsible for each?

Perhaps the secret sauce is not who’s teaching but what’s being taught.  It’s a lot easier to align standards, curriculum and assessment in math. “There is little controversy as to the subject matter to be covered, and the order in which one ought to tackle subjects is more obvious,” Willingham and Grissmer write.  “Indeed, substantial effort has been made over the last 25 years to develop coherent math standards and curricula from K-8.”

In reading? Not so much.

As we’ve discussed many times on this blog, there’s no direct correlation between the subject matter that gets taught and tested in reading.  We teach random, incoherent content that bears no relation to the passages children ultimately encounter on their reading tests.  We insist on teaching and testing the “skill” of reading comprehension when it’s clearly not a skill at all.  Willingham and Grissmer conclude:

“Yes, overall teaching quality would improve with a more sensible method to usher hapless teachers out of the profession. Better teacher training would help too. But in addition to these longer-term goals, policymakers ought to focus on ensuring that the unglamorous but vital work of curriculum design is done properly. The popular perception is that America’s teachers are largely ineffective compared to international peers. But the data show that when given a clear, cogent curriculum to work with, they’re a lot stronger than we think.”

Our Strange Descent Into Jargon

by Guest Blogger
July 7th, 2011

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Posted in Curriculum | 18 Comments »

by Diana Senechal

At age fourteen, I took interest in curriculum—specifically, Soviet curriculum. My family went to Moscow for a year, in 1978–79; my parents were on sabbatical, and my sister and I attended Soviet schools. Before  our trip, I learned that students in the ninth grade read Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and other nineteenth-century Russian authors. That settled that: I was determined to enter the ninth grade (comparable to grade 10 or 11 in the U.S.). I wanted to read all of these literary works in the original; I knew it would take some effort, but that didn’t deter me. My wish came true; I was allowed to enter the ninth grade. I took to my responsibilities with fervor, participating eagerly, often clumsily, in class and poring over my reading at home. By spring I was reading Dostoevsky without a dictionary, carrying Crime and Punishment with me everywhere, living the phrases.

The literary works saved the curriculum from being dreadful. Despite the ideological slant of the textbooks, the curriculum tacitly acknowledged that the literature mattered in itself. This acknowledgment was hard won. Even in 1978, well after the Khrushchev Thaw, many works were still banned (including Doctor Zhivago), others hard to find, still others taught with narrow political interpretations—but the literature would not give into these limitations, nor would the readers. Many Russians and other Soviets read avidly, memorized poems, went to great ends to obtain books, published and distributed censored works through “samizdat,” and spent evenings arguing about favorite authors and works. (Yes, this stereotype has been exaggerated, but there is truth to it.) Literature was a serious matter for them, and the school curriculum reflected this.

In American education discussion, we generally treat literature as an afterthought. To insist on this or that work, many say, is to “impose” one’s values on others or to demand that all children learn in “lockstep.” People shy away from recommending a particular work; instead, they refer to “text complexity” or some other generic feature that the book should possess. While short of censorship, this amounts to something similar: a concession to the flat culture of “whatever.” The priorities shift: the point is not for students to read Irving, Melville, Poe, or Twain, but for them to locate a central idea, trace an argument from start to finish, or engage in paired and small-group conversation about a text—any text at all, so long as it meets certain criteria. The Common Core State Standards make a gesture toward literature, but the very fact that is a gesture shows how touchy the matter is. The greater gesture is toward “informational texts,” which are considered essential for “college and career readiness.”

In a manner very different from that of the Soviets, we have created our own regime of jargon: “college and career readiness,” “text complexity,” “reading strategies,” “scaffolding,” “targeted assessments,” “differentiation,” “value added,” and so forth. Yes, these terms have a meaning and serve a purpose. All the same, when we surround ourselves with them, we lose touch with the language that makes all of this worthwhile, such as the lines from Othello, “’Twill out, ’twill out! I peace? / No, I will speak as liberal as the north, / Let heaven and men and devils, let them all, / All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.” Of course education discussion cannot subsist on Shakespeare alone; of course it needs some terminology. But without any discussion of the things worth learning, it’s hard to make any sense of “achievement” and “improvement” and other such words.

There are several related issues here. First is the importance of subject matter to education discussion. Be it physics, history, or literature, the subjects themselves illuminate what we do. Second is the matter of a specific curriculum. At some level, the curriculum must lay out a good portion of what students will learn (including the literary works they will read). Without such specificity, curriculum discussion becomes personalized (“I don’t find Shakespeare developmentally appropriate for my students, but I’m not telling you what to do.”) Without common ground within a school, it is difficult, if not impossible, to build on what one is doing. Third, there is the value of literature itself. Teachers may disagree about which works are important, but the importance is there. To make it all a matter of opinion is to trivialize it. It is preferable to fight for a beloved work than to remove specific works from the curriculum.

Is a national literature curriculum the solution? Probably not. But there are other ways to honor literature in the curricula and schools. A district or state curriculum could specify a few works and leave the rest to the discretion of teachers and schools. Or it could lay out a sequence of works and authors but allow for some substitutions. (Many high schools do this as a matter of course; elementary and middle schools could follow suit.) In any case, works of literature and literary nonfiction would be at the center, and skills would take their place around them. This would do more than prepare students for college and career; it would give them something to carry through their lives. It would give them a sense of language that goes beyond the usual. Students would learn to see past the jargon of the day, whatever it might be. They would become aware of aspects of life that push beyond assumptions, that don’t quite add up—in Frost’s words, “formulae that won’t formulate—that almost but don’t quite formulate.” They would learn, through repeated readings, that one’s initial understanding often isn’t the best—that it takes time for a work or concept or historical event to reveal its character. This awareness is no frill. It keeps the mind alive.

Diana Senechal has written for American Educator, Education Week, Educational Leadership, American Educational History Journal, and numerous blogs. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures from Yale and taught for four years in New York City public schools. Her book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield Education in November.

A Model for Excellent Teaching?

by Guest Blogger
August 19th, 2010

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Posted in Teaching | 18 Comments »

by Diana Senechal

Note:  This essay by former Core Knowledge teacher Diana Senechal originally appeared at Gotham Schools.

The path toward teacher certification is laden with demands that prospective teachers prove that they’re sensitive, socially conscious, and self-critical. If a national group of education agencies has its way, those demands could soon extend throughout teachers’ careers.

Teachers and others would do well to look at the “Model Core Teaching Standards: A Resource for State Dialogue,” released in July for public comment. Developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers’ Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC), the new teaching standards (separate from the Common Core State Standards that have been in the news recently) retain much of the language of the 1992 teaching standards, with some reordering and rewording to match the “new times.” Whereas the 1992 standards were intended for beginning teachers (and adopted by 38 states), the new standards are for all teachers.

The ten standards fall into four categories: The Learner and Learning, Content Knowledge, Instructional Practice, and Professional Responsibility. Each standard is broken down into Performances, Essential Knowledge, and Critical Dispositions. Like the 1992 standards, the Model Core Teaching Standards downplay subject matter knowledge while emphasizing the social processes of the classroom and the attitudes that teachers should have. Because these standards come so soon after the Common Core State Standards, they might influence how the Common Core standards are interpreted and implemented.

The 1992 document devoted the first standard to content knowledge; the new standards address content in standards 4 and 5. Two standards devoted to content seem like more than one, but neither standard addresses the need for specific knowledge. They treat content as fluid and relative, not enduring or precise. One of the “critical dispositions” for the fourth standard states that

the teacher realizes that content knowledge is not a fixed body of facts but is complex, culturally situated, and ever evolving. S/he keeps abreast of new ideas and understandings in the field.

This statement reflects only part of the truth. Content is both changing and unchanging. Teachers should be aware of developments in one field, but they must know the subject well, down to the details. One cannot teach physics unless one knows its rudiments–regardless of recent discoveries in physics. One cannot teach a language well unless one is thoroughly versed in its grammar, idioms, pronunciation, inflection, and nuances. Anyone can babble about the latest theories on Shakespeare’s identity; fewer can illuminate the logic of Sonnet 146 or help students grapple with folly and reason in “Lear.” Such understanding requires years of immersion and thought.

The standards appear to treat knowledge as a subjective, personal, social matter. Consider one of the “performances” for the second standard, “Learning Differences”:

The teacher brings multiple perspectives to the discussion of content, including attention to students’ personal, family, and community experiences and cultural norms.

Why should this be expected of all teachers? There is a time and place for multiple perspectives, but when you take this too far, the teacher may deny students the clarity of a right answer or direct approach to a problem. In algebra class, for instance, it is important that students actually learn how to solve algebra problems. Personal experiences, likewise, can obscure as well as illuminate. Even champions of “text-to-self connections” warn that faulty connections can lead to confusion and distraction.

Collaboration is mentioned far more often in the standards than independent work; this imbalance may undermine the collaboration itself. Collaboration is valuable when students have something to collaborate over. Sadly, the more they are asked to collaborate, the less they will bring to the table, unless they also learn how to wrestle alone with problems, ideas, and language. There should be equal emphasis on rigorous solitary thought. The best collaboration happens when the members have worked on their own and put thought into the project. If they are unable to do that, the collaboration quickly degenerates into chatter.

The standards articulate many attitudes and “critical dispositions” expected of teachers. The ninth standard (Reflection and Continuous Growth) states that a teacher

reflects on his/her personal biases and seeks out resources to deepen his/her own understanding of cultural, ethnic, gender, and learning differences to build stronger relationships and create more relevant and responsive learning experiences.

Yes, teachers should be able to question their own actions and assumptions. An introspective bent is important if not essential to good teaching. However, things become murky when teachers must show evidence of their self-questioning. Teachers who resist that sort of public display might receive low evaluations in this area, while those who produce confessions may be praised. It is fair to expect teachers to abide by an ethics code; it is not fair to require them to display their self-questioning. This may be hardest on teachers who take introspection seriously (and there are many such teachers), for they will be asked to bare their souls or else come up with a superficial version of their thoughts.

All in all, the “Model Core Teaching Standards” rely on faulty premises. They downplay the importance of concrete knowledge. They disregard the enduring aspects of subject matter, the things that need to be learned, pondered, read, and reread. They emphasize collaboration without likewise emphasizing independent thought. They expect teachers to be reflective, but without autonomy of thought. None of this is particularly new; many education schools have similar value systems. Once upon a time, such requirements were part of a teacher’s initiation; once you made it through the hoops, people left your thoughts alone, unless there was reason for concern. Now teachers may have to demonstrate “correct” attitudes and thoughts throughout their careers.

Far from meeting the needs of a new world, these standards ignore the qualities that have characterized fine teachers over the centuries: knowledge and love of the subject; keen awareness of the students and respect for their privacy; and the ability to demand concentration, precision, integrity, and hard work. Within this, there are many personalities and variations — but these qualities are not outdated, nor will they ever be.

Why People Think Educators Are Fools

by Robert Pondiscio
August 16th, 2010

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Posted in Education Practice | 12 Comments »

Suppose your doctor used the words “treatment” and “surgery” interchangeably.

“Your child has a cold. Give him plenty of rest and lots of liquids. That’s the best surgery.”
“Excuse me, Doc?”
“Rest and liquids. That’s the only operation he’ll need.”
“You mean treatment, right?
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“No, you said he needs surgery.”
“Surgery, treatment. Same thing.”

There are probably not many doctors who would conflate the two terms. Neither are there many lawyers who think “conviction” and “settlement” are synonyms. We wouldn’t have much confidence in those that do. So why then, should we take seriously the opinion of any “expert” who can’t or won’t differentiate between “standards” and “content”?

E.D Hirsch on Standards: “First, Do No Harm”

by Robert Pondiscio
January 15th, 2010

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Posted in Curriculum, Education News, Educational Policy, Research and Reports, Teaching | 3 Comments »

EdWeek’s Quality Counts special report offers a comprehensive catch-up on the issues surrounding the soon-to-be-released work of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.  Lots of great reads:  Sean Cavanagh’s overview looks at the history of academic standards, unresolved issues, and (thank you!) the perpetual confusion between standards and curriculum.  Stephen Sawchuk’s piece looks at the issues for teachers.  We’ve always had national standards, writes Diane Ravitch in a commentary, citing the de facto standards created by textbooks and college entrance exams in the early part of the 20th century.  Comparing the current intiative to those predecessors, Ravitch observes,

The two greatest risks of the current effort to set common standards are that they will be so prescriptive they will be resisted, or they will be so vague that they can easily be ignored. Either course would be likely to end in failure, and neither would promote the rich, full education that our students need.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. provides the lead commentary in EdWeek’s package and both praises and buries the initiative.  He compliments the draft document’s insistence that students must command a “base of knowledge across a wide range of subject matter by engaging with works of quality and substance.”  Less commendable is the continued insistence on viewing reading as a transferable, how-to skill

…thus repeating the error of current state standards of encouraging main-idea hunting and “inferencing.” There is no good scientific basis for believing that exercises in logical inference from texts or main-idea finding can significantly raise language abilities. Inference in language is not chiefly a formal skill. Untrained people are able to make very good inferences from texts when they already know something about the subject. But they cannot reliably draw correct inferences from texts about unfamiliar subjects.

“At the very least, then, language standards need to say clearly and forcefully that standards in reading, writing, speaking, and listening are not intended to be explicitly taught as skills. Rather, even these preliminary standards need to stress that academic content—in literature, history, science, and the arts—must be taught coherently and cumulatively in order to impart the requisite language competencies,” Hirsch writes. “There is no other way to verbal competence. The formalistic approach has failed for many years and will continue to do so,” he concludes.

We Americans have had an allergy to tackling the content problem at any level—ignoring the fact that somebody (mainly textbook makers) must always be dictating content in the schools, even if it is trivial, fragmented, skills-based content. If the crafters of our standards don’t encourage or require content coherence and cumulativeness (just to name two necessary elements), they will have failed the most basic requirement of this task: First, do no harm. And they will have done little to improve the unacceptable stasis in American education.

Laws, Sausages, and National Standards

by Robert Pondiscio
June 9th, 2009

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Posted 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

by Alice Wiggins
April 22nd, 2009

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Posted 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

by Robert Pondiscio
November 18th, 2008

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Curriculum | No 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.

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