Less than two months ago, U.S. governors and state school chiefs released recommendations for national education standards in math and English. The standards were developed by the states, which can choose whether to adopt them, but U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said he is “ecstatic” about the initiative. The New York Times reports today that 27 states have already adopted them—and to that number we can add Massachusetts, which voted in favor of them this morning. About a dozen more states are expected to do so shortly.
The NYT notes, “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 Act.” National standards would certainly avoid that problem. Whether they will reduce the teaching to the test that NCLB seemed to foster remains an open question—and would also depend on how states implement the standards and assess students, matters that are still in progress. My other big problem with NCLB is that while it may have helped some lower-performing schools and students, it leaves little time or incentive for better students to challenge themselves. Is it progress if all our students converge on the average, but none excel?
I’m still trying to get my head around how the new standards might change things. If you’re interested in doing the same, the Common Core Standards Web site is a good place to start. (Also of note: Development of the new standards was funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I’m hoping that doesn’t mean that when a student doesn’t know the answer to a question, she will turn blue and freeze like my PC.)
Since I know you all tend to have opinions, what do you think? Are national “Common Core Standards” that specify what is taught in math and English at each grade level a good thing? Better than the NCLB approach to education? Good for states with poor standards, bad for states like Massachusetts that already have strong state standards? Problematic in other ways? The best thing to happen to education since dustless chalk?
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I think that the common core standards are not a good thing, at least as currently managed in this process, which has rushed to develop standards for K-12 with little input from higher education professionals, and which has states signing onto standards even before they are finished! And the connections to standardized assessments are going to generate millions of dollars in business for testing companies…but that’s another question.
In terms of writing, the common core standards don’t address the kinds of thinking strategies that will set students up for success in college. The core standards documents treat writing as more of a product than a process and focus on a very limited set of writing genres (writing to inform, explain, and narrate). I think it’s important to do those tasks in writing, of course, but I think it’s more important that students leaving high school understand that good writers need to be able to address a number of different situations, that the way in which they address those situations will depend on the situation (they will choose their texts to fit the occasion, in other words), and that writers draw on various habits of mind in order to develop texts. The core standards project offers a very stunted view of writing, and that’s not good.
While I think standards generally provide guidance for creating meaningful, purpose-driven curriculum, I do worry that these standards will fall short, especially if it is expected that they will continue to be measured via standardized tests. The most important things students need to be learning are skills, yet standardized testing tends to focus more on facts. (And the tests that have open-ended questions run into all sorts of scoring issues. Witness the current big mess in Florida.)
I haven’t figured out what the answer is yet–though I could get on board with increasing pay and general respect for teachers. On a micro-level, for individual teachers in classrooms, I think that there needs to be more incentive to craft curricula that reach and interest more students. The recent push for standardized testing has had almost the opposite effect. And my gut reaction right now is that if Arne Duncan is excited about something new, it would probably not have the effect I would want.
I’m disappointed that Massachusetts adopted them, because I strongly believe it will mean lowering standards here. I saw an article that gave a few examples of the national standards, and one was teaching the Pythagorean Theorem in 8th grade. My son learned it in public school here in MA in grade 6. I know it’s just one example… but when the only example given that I could easily compare to current education means delaying something by 2 grades, I’m not impressed.
(The other examples I saw, like 3rd graders being able to identify the moral in a fable or myth, were not as easy for me to compare directly. I don’t recall that as something learned in a specific grade, or a separate skill than overall reading comprehension.)