President of the without a clue club?

In response to the common educational standards being proposed by governors and state education chiefs:

One critic said the proposal appeared to have unstoppable momentum.

"I think it's a done deal because Obama attached all this money," said Susan Ohanian, a former English teacher and education policy blogger who lives in Vermont.

She said standards deny teachers the ability to judge what should be taught and when. "If we don't trust teachers to do that, then we have no business leaving them in the classroom," she said.

The standards project was funded by the governors and state schools chiefs. Along with the Gates Foundation, it has backing from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and others. Drafters included experts affiliated with Achieve, ACT and the College Board. Reviewers included university professors and other educators.

Others are more positive:

The 70-page math proposal seeks to bring coherence, rigor and focus to instruction, said William Schmidt, a Michigan State University professor of education and statistics who reviewed it. In many states, he said, math standards are "a mile wide and an inch deep," in contrast to standards in countries that have outpaced the United States in achievement in recent years.

 

The 60-page English language-arts proposal, plus three appendices, seeks to build skills and knowledge in reading, writing, speaking and listening, with special focus on grammar, usage and vocabulary. E.D. Hirsch Jr., author of "Cultural Literacy," said the proposed emphasis on science and history texts would give students a stronger base of knowledge for reading.

Chester Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute praised the examples of suggested texts from ancient Greece (Homer) to modern times (Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri). "It's full of terrific stuff, high quality, content-rich, the kind of thing you want your kids or grandkids to read in school," he said.

I'm sure that somewhere someone (Glenn Beck I am looking at you Glenn Beck) will find some hidden communist agenda in this but for right now I am mildly optimistic

Here is a list of the recommended reading for the proposed standards.

Here is an excerpt of some of the standards

Update: I sent a copy of the reading list to my parents, my sister and my brother so that they could take a look at what may be recommended (required?) for my nieces and nephews along with the following suggested additions to the list:

If it was me I would add a few things, the entire Constitution and the amendments, Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The 9/11 Commission Report, The Road to Serfdom, A Brief History of Time, Selected Feynman Lectures, 1984, The Gulag Archipelago, Atlas Shrugged, A Tour of the Calculus, Wealth of Nations, Two Treatises on Government, maybe Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto, Treasure Island, and the Three Musketeers

Update 2: One of the Washington Post writers has some criticism of the standards.

What I especially worry about is a stepping up of what we have already seen happen with curriculum in the NCLB era. The “push down” effect has essentially pushed into lower grades the things kids are supposed to be able to do and know.

Once, schools gave youngsters a chance to learn how to read according to their own development. Now, a child who still can’t read by the end of first grade is in deep trouble from which it can be hard to emerge.

...

Telling teachers that they must teach certain things to each child in a specific grade ignores this notion of individual development.

Another concern about the new standards is that they are only for math and English. The emphasis on those subjects in No Child Left Behind's assessment scheme led to a dangerous narrowing of curriculum in public schools; the arts disappeared in many systems, science and history and physical education took a back seat too.

...

There is a common notion in American education reform circles that we are falling behind other countries with high-achieving school systems in large part because we don’t have national standards.

But in her new book, “The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future,” Stanford University Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who served as Barack Obama’s chief education adviser duringn the presidential transition, makes clear that this isn’t the case.

She explains how Finland--now widely hailed by U.S. policymakers--turned around its school system. But, contrary to popular belief, it didn’t do it by establishing a highly centralized national system with detailed national standards.

It “shifted to a more localized system in which highly trained teachers design curriculum around very lean national standards,” she wrote. All assessments are school-based, designed by teachers, rather than standardized.

Valid criticisms and they echo the concern of commenter car in in the comments. My responses would be:

Push down is a concern but from what I can see these are not grade specific standards, but a set of outcomes that all students should be able to achieve by graduation. Maybe there are proposed grade specific standards coming, if so they would need further evaluation. Finland is used as an example of a case against national standards:

She explains how Finland--now widely hailed by U.S. policymakers--turned around its school system. But, contrary to popular belief, it didn’t do it by establishing a highly centralized national system with detailed national standards.

But in reality this is comparing apples and oranges. Finland is a culturally homogenous country with 1/60th the population in 1/30th the area of the United States and about half the population is located in 6 cities in one geographic region. Unless the standards from city to city vary wildly the local standards are in effect national standards. Even if that wasn't the case what Professor Hammond advocates (lean national standards implemented at the local level) is what is being proposed

The entire set of reading standards consists of 18 items of this nature:

Determine both what the text says explicitly and what can be inferred logically from the text.

If that is to detailed we really have problems.   Math standards are more detailed but again it is only a set of measurable outcomes for graduation not specifics on how to get there. 

Posted by: chad98036 at 03:38 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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