A few articles on standards, curriculum and pedagogy

Please take a look at these articles- respond, asks some questions and respond to each others postings.


July 21, 2010-- nytimes.com

ON THE ROAD TO NATIONAL PRIVATIZATION: Many States Adopt National Standards for Their Schools
By TAMAR LEWIN

Less than two months after the nation's governors and state school chiefs released their final recommendations for national education standards, 27 states have adopted them and about a dozen more are expected to do so in the next two weeks.

Their support has surprised many in education circles, given states' long tradition of insisting on retaining local control over curriculum.

The quick adoption of common standards for what students should learn in English and math each year from kindergarten through high school is attributable in part to the Obama administration's Race to the Top competition. States that adopt the standards by Aug. 2 win points in the competition for a share of the $3.4 billion to be awarded in September.

"I'm ecstatic," said Arne Duncan, the secretary of education. "This has been the third rail of education, and the fact that you're now seeing half the nation decide that it's the right thing to do is a game-changer."

Even Massachusetts, which many regard as having the nation's best education system — and where the proposed standards have been a subject of bitter debate — is expected to adopt the standards on Wednesday morning. New York signed up on Monday, joining Connecticut, New Jersey and other states that have adopted the standards, though the timetable for actual implementation is uncertain.

Some supporters of the standards, like Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, worry that the rush of states to sign up — what Ms. Weingarten calls the "Race to Adopt" — could backfire if states do not have the money to put the standards in effect.

"I'm already watching the ravages of the recession cutting the muscle out of efforts to implement standards," she said. "If states adopt these thoughtful new standards and don't implement them, teachers won't know how to meet them, yet they will be the basis on which kids are judged."

The effort has been helped by financial backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to most of the organizations involved in drafting, evaluating and winning support for the standards. The common core standards, two years in the making and first released in draft form in March, are an effort to replace the current hodgepodge of state policies.

They lay out detailed expectations of skills that students should have at each grade level. Second graders, for example, should be able to read two-syllable words with long vowels, while fifth graders should be able to add and subtract fractions with different denominators.

Adoption of the standards does not bring immediate change in the classroom. Implementation will be a long-term process, as states rethink their teacher training, textbooks and testing.

Those states that are not winners in the Race to the Top competition may also have less incentive to follow through in carrying out the standards.

"The heavy lifting is still ahead, and the cynic in me says that when 20 states don't get Race to the Top money, we'll see how sincere they are," said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of an education research group in Washington, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a longtime advocate of national standards. "They could just sit on their hands, chill out and say, 'Well, we don't really have the money right now to retrain our teachers.' "

Yet even promises of support for national standards are a noteworthy shift. Many previous efforts to set national standards have made little headway. In 1995, for example, the Senate rejected proposed history standards by a vote of 99 to 1.

The problem of wide variations in state standards has become more serious in recent years, as some states weakened their standards to avoid being penalized under the federal No Child Left Behind law. This time, the standards were developed by the states themselves, not the federal government. Last year, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers convened English and math experts to put together benchmarks for each grade.

Texas and Alaska said they did not want to participate in developing the standards. And Virginia has made it known that it does not plan to adopt the standards.

Increasingly, national standards are seen as a way to ensure that children in all states will have access to a similar education — and that financially strapped state governments do not have to spend limited resources on developing their own standards and tests.

"We'll have states working together for the first time on curriculum, textbooks, assessment," said Mr. Duncan. "This will save the country billions of dollars."

An analysis by Mr. Finn's institute, to be released Wednesday, determined that the new common core standards are stronger than the English standards in 37 states and the math standards in 39 states.

In most others, the report found that the existing standards are similar enough to the proposed common core standards that it was impossible to say which were better.

States that adopt the standards are allowed to have additional standards, as long as the common core represents at least 85 percent of their English and mathematics standards.

In closely watched Massachusetts, even those who see the common core standards as a comedown for a state whose students score highly on national assessment tests say they have lost the battle.

"They're definitely going to be adopted," said Jim Stergios, executive director of Pioneer Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy organization.

Mr. Stergios' group found the common standards less rigorous than Massachusetts' existing ones.

"Vocabulary-building in the common core is slower," he said, citing one example. "And on the math side, they don't prepare eighth-grade students for algebra one, which is the gateway to higher math."

Others analyzing the two sets of standards disagreed.

Achieve Inc., a Washington-based education reform group, found the common core standards "more rigorous and coherent." WestEd, a research group that evaluated the standards for the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, found them comparable. And Mr. Finn's group said the Massachusetts standards and the common core standards were "too close to call."

But Mr. Stergios pointed out that the other groups had either funding from the Gates Foundation or connections to those who developed the standards.

"We're really the only ones who had no dog in this fight," he said.
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Uniformity Is Not Equality
July 21, 2010
Alfie Kohn is the author of a dozen books on education and human behavior, including “What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated?” and “No Contest: The Case Against Competition.”

The top-down, test-driven, corporate-styled “accountability” movement -- featuring prescriptive state standards -- has already done incalculable damage to our children’s classrooms, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Just ask a teacher. It’s no coincidence that the most enthusiastic proponents of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, etc., tend to be those who know the least about how kids learn. And now they’re telling us that a single group of people should shape the goals and curriculum of every public school in the country.
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What they don’t understand is that uniformity isn’t the same thing as excellence; high standards don’t require common standards. And neither does uniformity promote equity. One-size-fits-all instructional demands actually offer the illusion of fairness, setting back the cause of genuine equity.

No good data support the value of national standards. Even if you regard standardized test results as evidence of meaningful achievement (which I do not), it turns out that while most high-scoring countries have centralized education systems, so do most of the lowest-scoring countries.

It may be convenient -- particularly for companies that produce curriculum and tests -- to have all fourth graders learn the same thing, but that benefit is more than outweighed by the degree of control required to make communities and individual teachers get with the program even if they’d rather create lessons and assessments suited to their students.

Beyond uniformity, this proposal also conflates excellence with rigor (the premise being that harder is necessarily better) and specificity (for “clear” or “focused,” read: “narrow” and “reflecting a behaviorist model of learning”). And notice that the nationalizers’ public relations campaign tries to have it both ways: “Don’t worry, we won’t tell you how to teach,” they reassure educators. Yet their promised benefits are based on doing just that.
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Finally, what’s the ultimate goal here? It’s not to nourish curiosity, help kids to fall in love with reading, encourage critical questioning, or support a democratic society. Rather, the mantra is “competitiveness in a global economy” -- that is, aiding American corporations and triumphing over people who live in other countries.

The biggest fans of standardizing education are those who look at our children and see only future employees. Anyone who finds that vision disturbing should resist a proposal for national standards that embodies it.

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Making a Bad System Worse
July 21, 2010

Neal P. McCluskey is the associate director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute and the author of "Feds in the Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples and Compromises American Education."

National-standards supporters are trying to address a real problem: When left to their own devices, districts and states have either established low standards or weak accountability, or both.
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But imposing national standards does nothing to change the basic political reality that has created this dismal situation: Public schooling is a government monopoly, and the people employed by it – those who would be held accountable – are the most motivated and best organized to engage in education politics. The result is that sooner or later they get what they want, and what they naturally want is as little accountability to others as possible.

If anything, national standards will make this intolerable situation worse, pushing accountability-gutting forces up from 50 statehouses and focusing them all on Washington.

But if neither district, state, nor federal control can solve our problems, what can? Eradicating government monopolies. Rather than having government fund and control schools, let parents control education dollars and choose among autonomous educational options. Then, rather than using politics to circumvent accountability, educators will have to compete for customers, driving both real accountability and ever-improving standards.

We know this works, with abundant research showing that the most free-market education systems consistently outperform monopolies. In contrast, there is no meaningful empirical evidence that national standards improve outcomes.

Why the free-market success? It’s certainly in part because markets don’t suffer from the special-interest dominance that has crippled state standards and accountability. But there are other benefits. Perhaps most important, freedom enables schools to specialize in the differing needs of unique children rather than having to treat all kids like carbon copies. It also requires ideas about “the best” standards to compete, and keeps bad standards from taking everyone down with them.

Unfortunately, none of this seems to register with would-be national standardizers. Given their goal, that’s bad news for everyone.
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Equalizing Mediocrity
July 21, 2010

Sandra Stotsky is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas.

The case for national standards rests in part on the need to remedy the inconsistent aims and inferior quality of many state standards and tests in order to equalize academic expectations for all students. The argument also addresses the urgent need to increase academic achievement for all students. In mathematics and science in particular, the United States needs much higher levels of achievement than its students currently demonstrate for it to remain competitive in a global economy.
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The Common Core standards may accomplish the goal of equalizing education but not in a way the supporters initially hoped: they may lead to more uniformly mediocre student achievement than we now have. The national system is unlikely to accomplish the aim of raising academic achievement because it may reduce the number of high school students taking advanced mathematics and science courses in our high schools and make us much less competitive internationally than we now are.

The weaknesses in the proposed middle school standards -- the key to advanced mathematics and science course-taking in the high school (never mind college) -- suggest a deliberate effort to reverse a trend that was further encouraged by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel in 2008 — increasing the number of students in grades K-7 capable of taking and passing an authentic Algebra I course in eighth grade.

In Massachusetts alone, over 50 percent of its students now take Algebra I by the end of eighth grade; in California, of the 60 percent of students who now take Algebra I by eighth grade, almost 50 percent now pass. To continue this trend, which would put our students closer to students in high achieving East Asian countries in grade 8, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel sought to strengthen the mathematics curriculum in the middle grades. Without explicit justification or explanation, the Common Core has changed the thrust of the true reform in mathematics education over the last decade and will set us back.

Common Core’s “college readiness” standards do not point to a level of intellectual achievement that signifies readiness for authentic college-level work.

At best, they point to little more than readiness for a high school diploma.
Common Core’s standards may well help many states to frame a stronger high school curriculum than their current standards do. Preparing all high school students for a meaningful high school diploma is something we have not yet achieved as a country and still need to do.

But preparing some high school sophomores or juniors for credit-bearing freshman coursework in an open admissions post-secondary institution, especially if the coursework has been adjusted downward in difficulty to accommodate them, is a strategy to evade the real problem — how to strengthen the secondary school academic curriculum

We face a possible decline in advanced mathematics course-taking in high school by students in the broad middle third (or higher) of our high school-age population if Common Core’s standards are adopted. Fewer students will enter high school with Algebra I under their belt. Students deemed “college-ready” will be encouraged to leave high school after grade 10 or 11 to enroll in a college degree program.

We need to ask if it is wise to encourage students in the academic middle who have been deemed “college ready” to enroll in a public college (at their own expense) before they have completed their last year or two of high school (at public expense) and to bypass high school graduation requirements. They will matriculate in a post-secondary institution with less mathematics knowledge than they would have had if they had first completed high school graduation requirements.
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At-Risk Children Will Benefit
July 21, 2010
Michael Goldstein is the founder of MATCH Charter Public School in Boston.

I hope my staff and students don't kill me. I like national voluntary standards; they like the standards in our state, Massachusetts, as they are now. Using state standards, our team has built a good curriculum (though we're always tinkering). With that curriculum, our students (mostly from low-income families, and arriving years behind grade level) have aced the state's Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams.
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So changing from state to national standards would create uncertainty and new work for our teachers. They think: It ain't broke, why fix it?

Still, though it won't help our school much, I do think national standards could help millions of at-risk children.

First, it will be easier to share good ideas and curriculum. For example, our school recently began a collaboration with the Houston school district, 1,800 miles away. For the past t10 years, we've built up a math curriculum that allows tutors to "turn around" failing inner-city students. But here's the catch. The Massachusetts standards and Texas standards don't line up. So we can't simply hand our stuff to folks in Houston.

Second, national standards go nicely with the rise of blogs, self-publishing and platforms like BetterLesson.com. Some amazing teachers will sell their yearlong courses, often displacing textbook companies (or making licensing relationships with them). If you're teaching 9th grade algebra, do you want a book from Scholastic, or a whole curriculum (lesson plans, homework, classwork, a yearlong calendar, remediation plans, "Do-Nows," "Tickets-to-leave", quizzes, unit tests and a final exam) from the Teacher of the Year in, say, Philadelphia?

Do I worry about who controls national standards? Sure. Some will try to replace substance with mush. Others will push a political agenda on social studies in particular. But that happens anyway. This year the Texas School Board rewrote social studies to fit a conservative view (if you imagine the United Nations as a conspiracy to take over the United States with black helicopters, you'll have the gist). So I suspect it's better to fight for good standards on one battlefield instead of 50.
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Common Standards Are Helpful
July 21, 2010
Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the author of "All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools Through Public School Choice," and "Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy."

The educational logic behind national standards has always been strong, but the politics have been difficult, as some conservatives assert the importance of local control and some liberals oppose the testing that comes with strong standards. Now, thankfully, the political momentum has shifted in favor of common standards as cash-starved states seek federal support from an administration enthusiastic about uniform standards.
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Years ago, the legendary teacher union leader and education reformer Albert Shanker backed national standards, noting that virtually all the nations that beat us on international assessments had in place uniform standards of what students should know and be able to do.

Particularly in America, he pointed out, given the mobility of the population, students suffered when they moved between jurisdictions with different sets of standards. Shanker asked, “Is an understanding of the Constitution or the way to write a decent paragraph more important for students in some communities than in others? Should children in Alabama learn a different kind of math or science from children in New York?”

Since Shanker’s death in 1997, the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act further underlined the incoherence of having a patchwork of 50 different state standards -- with differing content and different levels of performance expected.

Interestingly, uniform standards is one area where teachers’ unions and the education reform community can come together. While some worry that a strong system of uniform standards will rob educators of their creativity, leaders of the American Federation of Teachers have long backed a solid set of well-articulated standards because it makes a teacher’s job more manageable. And while state standards are often weak and incoherent, providing little guidance to teachers, a strong set of common standards would free teachers from both writing the script and performing it. They could, like actors, focus on interpretation and delivery.

Of course, there will be disagreements over the content of common standards, but other societies -- those that continually outperform ours -- show it’s possible, through democratic debate, to reach consensus about what children should learn in school.
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Understandable, but Wrong
July 21, 2010
Bruce Fuller is professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

After showing robust vital signs in the 1990s, test scores have flat-lined in recent years. According to President Obama and a bipartisan majority of governors, the way to fix that is to develop a shared set of curricular standards.
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It makes sense. The early days of standards-based accountability clearly produced gains, especially for children with weak literacy skills. And common standards push states to define in uniform ways which students are truly proficient. (Right now a child deemed a "proficient" reader by officials in Texas is reading at the below basic level in Massachusetts.)

But will national standards rekindle student progress, or prove to be an illiberal reform from a progressive president? Arne Duncan, Obama’s education secretary, points to Germany and Japan, where centralized standards and national tests coincide with strong student performance. Yet correlation does not prove causality. And these societies are eager to undo rote learning and nurture greater inventiveness among their graduates – a key driver of technological advances and value-added returns to the national economy.

The strange thing in all this is that the political left is now preaching the virtues of systems, uniformity and sacred knowledge. Lost are the virtues of liberal learning, going back to the Enlightenment when progressives first nudged educators to nurture in children a sense of curiosity and how to question dominant doctrine persuasively.

Sure, all children must first learn how to read. But standards will likely be swallowed as sacred knowledge, transmitted through efficient didactics, oddly endorsed by contemporary liberals.

The Obama administration is wisely trying to get back to a surgical way of holding schools accountable: distill the complicated enterprise of human learning down to concrete, uniform bundles of knowledge. Then, stimulate local educators to devise more motivating classroom practices, spurred by market competition from charter schools and parental choice.

But standards threaten to further routinize pedagogy, filling students with bits of reified knowledge -- leaving behind the essence, the humanistic genius of liberal learning.
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State’s Exams Became Easier to Pass, Education Officials Say
By JENNIFER MEDINA

Published: July 19, 2010

New York State education officials acknowledged on Monday that their standardized exams had become easier to pass over the last four years and said they would recalibrate the scoring for tests taken this spring, which is almost certain to mean thousands more students will fail.


While scores spiked significantly across the state at every grade level, there were no similar gains on other measurements, including national exams, they said.

“The only possible conclusion is that something strange has happened to our test,” David M. Steiner, the education commissioner, said during a Board of Regents meeting in Albany. “The word ‘proficient’ should tell you something, and right now that is not the case on our state tests.”

Large jumps in the passing rates, which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg trumpeted in his re-election campaign last year, led to criticism that the tests had become too easy.

The state agreed to have researchers at Harvard University analyze the scores and compare them with results on national exams and Regents tests, the subject exams that high school students are required to take for graduation. Those researchers found that students who received a passing grade on the state eighth-grade math exam, for example, had a one-in-three chance of scoring highly enough on the math Regents test in high school to be considered prepared for college math.

State math and English exams, which are given to all third through eighth graders, have historically been easier to pass than national math and English exams, which are given to a sampling of fourth and eighth graders around the United States.

But according to the Harvard researchers, the New York state exams have become even easier in comparison with the national exams: students who received the minimum score to pass the state math tests in 2007 were in the 36th percentile of all students nationally, but in 2009 they had dropped to the 19th percentile.

“That is a huge, massive difference,” Dr. Steiner said.

The tests are developed by CTB/McGraw-Hill and overseen by the State Education Department and its volunteer technical advisory group, which is made up of several testing experts.

Dr. Steiner, who became education commissioner a year ago, said that the exams had tested a narrow part of the curriculum, particularly in math, and that questions were often repeated year to year, with a few details changed, so that a student who had taken a practice test — as many teachers have their students do — were likely to do well.

“It is very likely that some of the state’s progress was illusory,” said Daniel Koretz, the Harvard testing expert who led the research. “You can have exaggerated progress over all that creates very high pass rates. It doesn’t seem logical to call those kids proficient.”

The state said it had begun to include a broader range of topics on its tests, making the questions less predictable. Dr. Steiner refused to say what the passing scores would be for the tests this year but said the numbers would be a “major shift.”

Last year, 77 percent of students statewide were deemed proficient in English, up from 62 percent in 2006; 86 percent passed the math test, compared with 66 percent three years earlier. The scores this year are expected to be released at the end of the month.

The changes are likely to lower the passing rates significantly all over the state, particularly in districts and schools in large urban cities. Superintendents in Buffalo and Syracuse are criticizing the changes, saying that the move to raise the passing scores is akin to moving goalposts.

“We’ve lost sight of the purpose of the test — it’s supposed to show you’ve mastered a certain skill at a certain time,” said Daniel G. Lowengard, the superintendent in Syracuse.

“I think it’s unfair to teachers to say thank you very much, you’ve been doing this work for the last three or four years, and now that your kids are passing, all of sudden we’re going to call a B a C and call a C a D.”

But in New York City, where the scores are used for things like letter grades assigned to schools and teacher and principal bonus pay, Chancellor Joel I. Klein said he supported the changes.

“We’ve said a million times we support higher standards,” he said. “It will make all of us raise the bar.”
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