New Education Standards: Creating an Army of Bloggers
While half the country is apparently out Googling Asperger's Syndrome (thanks to last night's new episode of "Parenthood," I guess), the National Governors Association has released a plan to help not just kids on TV, but all U.S. kids: Common Core Standards for education from Kindergarten through 12th grade.
Currently, no national standards exist for schools, which are instead subject to myriad state and local curriculum guides and classroom benchmarks. The independence of schools from national control has long been a hallmark of the U.S. education system, as communities have often fought to teach their children in their own way/image. This has led, increasingly, to strange initiatives that limit what students are allowed to see in their textbooks: think of Kansas's efforts to alter the teaching of evolution, or the on-going battle in Texas over whether the state's textbooks should more centrally feature conservative activists.
While politicians fight over what's acceptable in the classroom, U.S. schools and students have consistently fallen behind other developed countries in national scores on math and reading, in high school graduation rates, and in numbers of young people with college degrees. Strangely, though teachers aren't held to a national standard, students who want to go to college are, through the ACT and SAT.
The core standards aim to fix this. They're not so prescriptive as to subvert the will of a community to teach their students what and as they would, but they provide very clear benchmarks for each grade level in writing, reading, and math. For instance, in 6th Grade, students should be able to look at an informational text and "Distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment"; by 11th and 12th grade, readers should be able to look at an informational text and "Synthesize and apply multiple sources of information presented in different formats in order to address a quest or solve a problem, including resolving conflicting information." No specific textbooks or readings are assigned, but suggestions and examples are offered to point teachers and school districts in the right direction. They're clear, concise, and well-studied standards.
These standards provide for "vertical learning," where students consistently build on skills and expand knowledge bases from one year to the next, instead of learning one thing and then bouncing to something else that seems completely unrelated. Think back to your own high school experience, and you may realize how revolutionary that is.
More than any of the specific standards, though, I find the scope and focus of the study to be extremely exciting. Check this out:
To be ready for college, workforce training, and life in a technological society, students need the ability to gather, comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, report on, and create a high volume and extensive range of print and nonprint texts in media forms old and new. The need to research and to consume and produce media is embedded into every element of today’s curriculum.
Methinks the Core Standards might just be creating an Army of Good Bloggers. At the very least, emphasizing the need for critical reading and written analysis may lead to fewer students who are sucked in by poorly drawn arguments, leading to... an informed populous! Just imagine!
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Catherine Forsythe
Writer to the Stars
Emily Holleman
Iron Skillet
Leslie Harpole
old new lefty
Salon.com
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Well, there goes all the consumers of right wing media. Maybe there's hope yet!
This is what I most wish for - and it's been shown that you can teach this by early adolescence, so I hope we don't hear any whining about how this is too much to expect -- which I suspect would mostly be cover for those who don't really want a populace with critical thinking skills. After all, much easier to manipulate those who lack them.
Definitely interested, Juliet. I once wrote a research paper suggesting that composition classes throw out standard essays in favor of making students blog, so this is right up my alley.
Silkstone, I agree -- I wish for this most fervently.
That's the experience in a nutshell, isn't it?
It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Local control of the schools is a very big deal in most of the nation!
Great post, SS... we could use some standards down here.. ya hear?
There is a whole “news” network on cable TV right now devoted to the quest that even adults should not be able to discern this.
At the time, it seemed like a good idea.
My son is 4 and has taught himself to read. He pretends to be illiterate in school because there they teach phonics and he's learned it all the "Sesame Street way" - which, apparently (as his teacher told me) is "not constructive when it comes to group teaching".
Worse than this sort of attitude - where a students achievements are no longer celebrated if they differ from the norm - is the atmosphere of failure this as created across the UK. Students from as young as 6 are now faced with a regime of tests and examinations that require them, at every turn, to validate their teachers, schools and own performances in school.
While it's a good thing to have core standards, extreme care must be taken in their implementation, else children as young as 7 and 8 can fail at school simply because they failed one particular test (personal circumstances are still not taken into account), or because the way of learning that suits them best is not one represented at their particular school.
The implementation of core teaching standards can at once have positive and negative effects upon education; watch carefully if you're a parent of a school-aged child and don't be shy of giving your opinion of what happens, whether it's asked for or not - something we Brits are notoriously bad at.
First, no mnatter how this is presented, certain local school districts will object just on "principle." The phrase "reasoned judgment" alone will be seen as code for "liberal".
Second, the description of what a college or workforce-ready student should be able to do is a great start but doesn't go far enough in emphasizing true critical thinking skills, unless the word "evaluate" is supposed to encompass training in the ability to weigh the veracity of information based on cognitive associations as well as rules of evidence and in challenging assumptions and perceptions.
Third, I hope that this "army of bloggers" will be able to discern the limits of hubris, the dangers of certainty and the merits of open-minded debate before they begin to share their ideas with the world. Then yes, we might begin to have a truly informed public.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1430070/forced_illiteracy_in_america.html
National standards should be a wake-up call for the lagging states. Unless they want to explain why kids from Michigan and Mississippi aren't as capable as kids from Massachusetts and Vermont.
I am taking part of the Praxis II on Saturday. I plan to teach high school English in the near future.
Locals always resist change as a human reaction. We witness this everyday in our U.S. House of Representatives who tend to be way more conservative and parochial than the Senate (although lately one could debate that point too). This process happens locally as well in education: “Yes, education needs fixing, but our schools are really pretty good.”
When we start to see pay scales that matter (e.g., pay a good math teacher more than a P.E. teacher, pay for results rather than longevity), increase schooling to year-round (let’s face it, public schools are a great child-care arrangement but often not good at much else), stop promoting students who simply cannot read or compute (you’d be surprised how many school systems say they don’t promote but in fact they do), stop allowing state legislatures to dictate what is taught on top of a national curriculum, stop using the schools to socially engineer diversity (or else mandate diversity in the real estate industry as well – ha!), stop the practice of allowing underperforming students to compete in athletics post-high school (another one of those where we say one thing and do another), and so on and so on, then we will be heading in the right direction.
Thanks for highlighting this important process. I am a professional educator (public schools) with a few good years left. I am always hopeful that we are turning the corner…we’ll see. Sorry about being a little long-winded.
In any event, all the standards in the world aren't going to help if schools aren't given proper resources and freed from the destructiveness of having to teach to the test. In Florida right now, Republicans in the legislature are pushing to reduce teacher salaries and increase class size. That's a nice way to attract the best people to the profession, isn't it!
Brandeis was not a right winger, and he talked about a "laboratory of the states" to get around right wing types running amok by nationalizing the Fourteenth Amdendment over state regulation of the economy.
Now, it is one thing to set a math curriculum, or ability to use Modern Standard English by some text in the 1930's I would pick, but, history is contestable in ways that you could get a very, very bad result if you insisted on one standard nationally, I think. But intertesting, I just think subject matter matters. Physics, we can agree on until String Theory, Math by definition, use of language, by definition to elite usages, but, some topics, may be better left alone.
Mostly they are put together by committees with little or no expertise. They sound good, but the basic premise, that children need to master all these myriad skills on the list, is flawed. Obviously so, when you can see that probably no adult the child knows can perform more than one or two of the hundreds of steps we are expecting the student to master.
To actually do a project to demonstrate each of these skills in each subject would take even the brightest and most motivated students far more time than we have set aside for all education.
So schools devise targeted lessons and tests, then teach to the tests.
All of these programs talk about how important it is to make children into "lifetime learners". So how do they plan to do that? What method do they have to make that happen, and how will they measure it, in a world where most adults never read anything and spend all their time watching mindless entertainment?
The answer is that no one knows and no one seems to care. The lofty words are enough.
Don't be so easily impressed. This is just so far on the wrong side of the curve.
I think, to be successful and "do-able" local or statewide schools would need to set up a blogging forum network within the educational system for students to open and author blogs on topics and in categories that might benefit their education.
Actually, I'm surprised that hasn't already happened.
With thoughtful rules of participation, blogging might be really a good exercise in how to participate in meaningful debate, critical thinking skills, social relationships and even more.
Perhaps opportunities for online student debates might be offered as well?
Goodness knows, future blogging communities might benefit. lol.
Students would be better served by having four years of basic scientific training than a year of each chemistry, biology, physics and anatomy (or whatever).
Go rigorous standards, Go!
It's funny you should write this now, when Diane Ravitch, education historian and Sec'y of Ed for both Bush I and Clinton, has come out with a new book eschewing her own former support for such accountability focused models. It's not that she is against rigor; it's that she understands now that rigid "standards" only create a test-driven culture that ultimately robs schools of focus on history and the arts. I know this firsthand: in the schools in which I teach, they have simply dropped social studies--think history here--from some middle school grades b/c the state dropped that particular standardized test for that grade.
The problem is simply this: Teachers (by virtue of the high stakes nature of these tests) will teach to the lowest common denominator. First appearances to the contrary, "rigorous standards" is code for leaving the brightest kids bored stiff. Because the focus is on accountability (ie, assessing the absorption of the standards, aka "a body of knowledge") rather than critical thinking, teachers will spend way too much time limiting their curriculum to what's on the standards list. In Ohio we're going one better: we're red flagging the standards to demonstrate the "super standards," which are meant to be the Super Duper Most Important Facts Out There. Now the teachers have essentially been given an even narrower list of facts on which their students will be tested. And that is all they will teach. Boom: we have just narrowed the curriculum further.
"U.S. schools and students have consistently fallen behind other developed countries in national scores on math and reading, in high school graduation rates, and in numbers of young people with college degrees." That is not a true statement but one that has been accepted as true. It is very misleading and unfair. I could debate and prove that I am right but I will not do so here. The fact that you can put that in a post and almost all who read it nod in agreement, is the best example of how lies repeated often enough by the Right become reality in our society. It is not surprising as last year Liberal icon, Bill Maher, puked up some of this on his HBO show.
Quickly, here are a couple points. The United States has a childhood poverty rate of over 20% compared to countries like Finland, for example who is always in the international tests, has a rate of around 3%. Finland has one basic language, and health care provided. The United States mainstreams their Special Education kids into regular classrooms; other countries put these same kids in vocational training or totally separate schools. These are not straight comparisons in fact when totally straight comparisons are made our schools are superior to most. Not many are interested in the truth on this matter but I speech on this for hours with no notes.
I am oversensitive to this myth and attack it whenever it pops up. Of course, it is like fighting the ocean.
That's probably true. I wonder if Mark Twain (or Benjamin Disraeli) can be blamed for that. People have indeed become cynical, to the point of thinking there is no objective truth. Certainly 2+2=4 and “ice freezes at 32 degrees fahrenheit” are examples of truths that are objective. Teaching qualitative reasoning, error estimation, etc. wouldn't hurt.