There are many dirty little secrets we teachers would prefer not to discuss. Maybe it’s that stack of papers which never got graded so you just gave everyone points. Maybe it’s the mastery with which you pretend to know a former student’s name when you run into them ten years later in a Wal-Mart with their own kids.
One of mine which I’ve had to admit to myself lately: I don’t really care all that much about state or national standards. As all the education sites and blogs erupted with commentary about the recent declaration that the national core standards are better than most states’ standards, I tried as much as I could to get fired up, but I couldn’t do it.
Sure, these lists of standards are useful for framing my scope and sequence each year. I go through each unit to cross check that I’m covering what the law tells me to. When these standards get revised by some committee in some board room, do I have to re-write my whole curriculum? Surprisingly, their continuous wordsmithing doesn’t change much on my end.
Perhaps since I teach language arts (which tends to lean toward skills standards rather than content standards) I’m in a different world. I don’t mean this question to be facetious or to imply my disagreement with them in principle, but: why do we pay so much attention to these encapsulated nuggets of teacherspeak called standards? Will a change in wording in Olympia or D.C. mean I will teach differently and suddenly be better at my job? Will telling bad teachers to pay more attention to standards make their students learn more or better? Or is it all public relations? If we just phrase these statements the right way, will all the ills of public education be resolved?
What is the big deal with standards? Why do we expend so much energy on them, care so much about them, and hang our hopes upon them? I want to hear your side.
From my 3rd grade teacher perspective, having standards helps, because it focuses my planning and instruction. Knowing, for example, which math material to cover and to what extent can be quite helpful.
That said, the math curriculum we use is custom-made to cover our state standards, so Mark’s right: Teachers don’t really have to pay that close attention to what the standards actually are.
Standards will help low achievers…I guess I don’t see the chain of connection.
I can follow the chain this far:
1. Standards are written.
2. Standards are used by textbook makers to write textbooks that don’t vary from state to state.
3. Standards are used to craft assessments which test whether the kids absorbed what was in the standardized textbook.
4. ?
…
15. Teachers become better teachers in order to make students better learners.
The links from 4 through 14 are the ones I’m missing, I guess. Writing a better book or making a more uniform test does not make a teacher better or make a kid learn more effectively. If teachers could teach better, it wouldn’t matter what the standards language is…we’re attacking the problem from the wrong end, in my opinion. If we want to improve student learning, start IN the classroom.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/7/21/who-will-benefit-from-national-education-standards/why-us-standards-will-benefit-at-risk-children
I think this perspective shows the promise of standards. Many other folks chiming can be found on the left-side navigation bar.
The standards rewrites really do not affect my classroom as much as my district’s administrators’ reactions to them. We’re asked the choose the most important eight “Power Standards” and focus on them. I think this is fine as long as I’m not restricted to those standards, but my district has shown time and again that it often only sees the immediate idea and not the ramifications down the road.
I don’t want to reach a point as a language arts teacher where I’m told kids can move from 10th to 11th grade after they complete the eight standards, and no other standard, skill, or content matters. However, this is the direction my district appears to be headed.
Your post struck a real chord with me from where I teach in the UK.
At times, national standards feel like a straightjacket that stifles responsiveness to my students’ enthusiasms. One of the principle barriers for my students is that what they are required to learn fails to fire them up. With enthusiasm for learning gone one has almost lost the battle. With learners on side it’s not so difficult to lead them from what they want to know to what they need to know.
Over-prescriptive standards are killing school for too many young people (and for many teachers too).
If I’m hearing you right, unless I’m a textbook company, I really don’t need to care all that much.
That makes me feel a little less bad about not having my state and national standards written at the top of each lesson plan each day.
The obvious concern–especially since you mention Texas–is who is involved with the forging of these standards, since the trickle-down effect is that it will shape what is in textbooks, which theoretically shapes what is taught in those schools who can afford to purchase new textbooks. Luckily for me, I suppose, I teach literature…so the textbook I use was adopted in 1989 after being originally published in 1986. I heard someone in my building say we’re up for a new Language Arts adoption and purchase in 10 or 11 years.
Even though I know the answer already (from past conversations on this site), how many practicing classroom teachers were involved with crafting these standards? …or perhaps that doesn’t really matter since as you point out the standards are not about the classroom, but rather are about textbook uniformity and ease and reliability of assessment design.
The standards don’t count, it’s what folks are going to do with them.
Currently we have 50 different sets of expectations for kids being assessed 45 or so different ways (there are some consortia like NECAP). It’s actually be demonstrated that “proficiency” in one state has no meaning in another state because of how different the standards are and because of different expectations on the assessments of those standards.
What the Common Core provides for is an opportunity to build common assessments, or at least to be able to more accurately translate assessment results from one state to another. That’s pretty cool. It’ll also allow for there to be cheaper purchasing of materials like textbooks because everyone is shopping for very similar content, rather than having to buy the book that’s catered to Texas or California or another big state. Another cool opportunity is that entrepreneurial ventures (for-profit and non-profit) will be able to scale more effectively. I’m thinking of folks like the Achievement Network. They build interim assessments for 2-8th grade students in reading and math and help districts analyze the data through job-embedded PD so that they can make smart decisions about their instruction throughout the year. Right now, when they want to offer their services in a new state, they have to write totally new benchmarks which match with a different set of standards. Now, with one set of interims they can offer comparisons between schools across city and state boundaries and expand far more easily to places where folks my find their services valuable (because, for instance, they can’t afford scantrons to do the grading themselves).