Join the conversation

Achievement follows the social and economic development of the regions and the states, and the individual districts.

The Standards - high, low, national, or non-existant - are a canard.

Which is more interesting: the differences between neighboring states with different standards, or the differences within one state (one set of standards) between neighboring districts? between an urban district and a neighboring suburban district?

To me, the answer is obvious. Something needs to be done to address the gross inequalities in education in this country. That something is unlikely to involve standards.

I agree with Jonathan. I've spent several days this summer helping my state do the "cross-walks" that show how the Common Core Standards match up with our existing state standards. I've also helped my state write three different sets of standards since the 1980s. The truth is there's no evidence at all that standards do anything to improve teaching and learning.

I started teaching in the 1970s and every language arts teacher I ever worked with did their best to teach their students to "Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text." Before there were any standards, we did our best to teach our students to "Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience."

Policy-makers like standards because they make them think they have some control. If state and national standards disappeared tomorrow, teachers and administrators at the school and district level would know what to teach. Teachers and administrators at private schools have no difficulty doing so and public school teachers and administrators had no difficulty doing so for the first 80 years of the 20th century.

You've got to chuckle over the resemblance this has to the "dropout crisis" as narrated by Sherman Dorn.

For political purposes, one must assume the crisis of nonexistent standards to exist. One wonders how we are able to communicate if the crisis is to be extrapolated backward to the nineteen fifties.

Thankfully, August places us in modern times, somehow walking in circles. Perhaps David Gonzales at DOE can be our global positioning device?

I like the way he (Gonzales) puts MA in contrast with MN which has quite a loose regulatory structure but equal math results in perspective with Hong Kong, Singapore, Finland, et cetera.

Jonathan, I agree that we have to do something to address inequities, and that standards alone won't come close to doing that. I worry that people are overselling them by making claims that they can. (One organization calls them "wallpaper" if they don't come with a whole host of other supports for teachers and students.) But I do think the lack of high standards can and in fact often does exacerbate inequities--There has been a legacy of teaching children of color to lower standards.

August, I don't agree. I know that many teachers would know what to do without standards, but I've also met many who are strong standards proponents, and who believe strong, well-crafted standards help them do their work well. The first 80 years of the twentieth century were a different era with different expectations. Private schools can be great, and they can be not so good. Luck of the draw....

Bob--The '50s were another era, and I don't know that we've been going in circles. We've been on an eccentric path. On second thought, we have gone in circles. We too often assume that half measures work. The standards movement became the testing movement. Low-quality tests have been de facto standards, supports for teachers have been scarce, and student supports have been sketchy. As for MA and MN.... MN does have a loose regulatory structures, but their math and science standards improved a great deal before the most recent administration of TIMSS. Again, observers saw the supports that accompanied the standards as a reason for MN's strong performance--which wasn't as strong as the performance of MA. Very hard to prove definitively, yes, but certainly suggestive. 

Claus, Perhaps you can point to me the great new curricula that has been developed (and verified) subsequent to the establishment of any of the state standards. That there are anecdotal reasons that some teachers might like standards does not negate the fact that the standards policy lever, in any form, has failed to make substantive improvements in student learning.

The problem with promoting/celebrating the CCSSI standards is that we are wasting tremendous time/energy/money towards a policy initiative (e.g. good standards will translate to better student learning) that will ultimately fail.

Shouldn't we be spending those RttT billions on real policies that actually might have a chance at raising student learning and narrowing the learning gap?

That was a typo. The previous post was mine (Erin).

Standards have yet to provide the environment for developing quality curricula (who is doing that besides Core Knowledge and K12? And both were not prompted by "standards"). Standards have had zero effect on improving student learning (ref. Whitehurst).

What are those programs that Massachusetts and Minnesota have developed? Both states have had a long tradition of quality education. And if we are to believe Fordham, Minnesota's standards were only mediocre (grade:C). What has been developed that was better than before the adoption of state standards?

Standards provide too much cover for ineffective programs. If a program "aligns the the standards" then schools assume that it must be of high quality. Publishers are masters at alignment. They are quite good at repackaging their same old material and calling it "aligned", without making any substantive improvements.

And textbook adoption committees for the most part like programs that they know and are comfortable with. So if the publisher states that it is aligned and it looks exactly like the materials that have always been used, then all the better.

As a policy lever, standards have failed every time that they have been tried. And certainly, no standards and no states have been able to match the top countries in the world (TIMSS for math, PISA for math, reading).

So standards make us all feel like we are doing something when in fact we are wasting time/money/energy on a policy that will ultimately lead to the status quo. This is not a path towards better schools and better student learning.

Policy levers that may help:

1) Set up a huge bonus prize for any school district/consortium that 1) matches or exceeds the best in the world as measured by TIMSS or PISA and 2)makes public all materials, methods, governance struture changes, accountability, etc.. for doing so.

2) Extend the idea of Advanced Placement to high school courses. That is develop course syllabi and end-of-course evaluations that capture the specific content/abilites needed for each course. Allow students choice about what classes to take depending upon interests and preparation.

Improvements in student learning will be highly dependant upon substantial improvements in classroom instruction. Standards are too far removed, vague/abstact and open to interpretation to have any substantive effect on classroom instruction.

Erin,

Your post reminds me of what Richard Feynman said about textbook committees. :-)

MA and MN have adopted Math standards from Singapore and have paid to go through a testing cycle as if they were countries. (It costs $250,000 per grade level.) The result is they are both comfortably close to the top performers:
https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AVit37FEB5eKZGcyazR2OG1fMjkxZHJ...
The ranks are a couple of pages into the presentation. Because they were both using the same standard, I expect Fordham is giving MA points based on perception of structure. TIMSS 2007 puts MA and MN in a statistically identical position in grade 8 if I recall it correctly. MN does a better job in some ways when you look at percentage of benchmarks.

The people involved in Math think that keeping a focus on narrower curriculum helps results. Please take a look at the people funding Patsy Wang-Iverson's work: http://www.rosenbaum-foundation.org/Advisory.html

However, it is also true that having more than our current proportion of science and math degreed teachers in middle school is important. That's one of the things the Singapore Math-sponsored trip to China is looking at this summer. Teachers have quite a different preparation than in the US as well prior to entering the classroom.

Neither Massachusetts nor Minnesota representatives at the meeting where the slide show was given (above) made claims that anything other than curriculum reform changed their results. Of course, Massachusetts made lots of changes, but the key is that Minnesota didn't make the same kind of changes.

Finally, one of the cornerstones of education reform is incentivisation. There are problems with that. Monetary incentives are not predictive according to Dan Ariely's work for the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. Personally, I react to being given more freedom to pursue my own goals more favorably than (almost) anything.

At this point, we should all look at the position paper that will be appearing from the NAACP and Urban League (plus others) that calls for equal access to funding. "Races to the Top" and prizes will probably be going away, but not for the reasons they should.

Here's why we need national standards:
http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/99153999.html

The people quoted don't understand that ignorance is not a point of view. That's a problem in more ways than one.

Standards don't have to be detailed, but they need to represent what upper division professors need to see when they look at freshmen. It's not nearly as complicated as people like to imagine.

Bob, While MA and MN are doing better than the rest of the states on the TIMSS math, they are not comparable to the best Asian countries.

As far as incentives, for the most part I would concur. Trying to provide carrots and sticks to teachers and schools has generally failed to improve student learning because of the limited scope that any one school/classroom has. They do not have the ability/flexibility/resources to develop new curricula, new state laws or new governance rules.

My point about the prizes would be to allow everyone to try any idea that they thought might work with the concept that even trying innovative ways to develop and evaluate improvements will benefit schools. And it would allow for investment by outside companies/communities with the idea that there could be return on their investment.

As far as using standards to combat ignorance. Good luck. Ignorance is still here even with all the state standards. National standards are unlikely to change that.

Thank you for sharing you opinion. I agree that high standard is not a guarantee to become a better school but setting up a realistic standard for the student will make the school a lot better. We must not forget to learn and enjoy at the same time for overall personal development.

In general, I agree with you Erin: good curriculum is more important that good standards. I will say, however, that California's ambitions history standards give me useful cover for teaching rigorously. Without them, I can easily imagine my principal insisting that my lessons were too fact-filled or "high school level" for my seventh graders. Our previous superintendent (I pity the Central California district that just got him) frequently criticized our middle school for being too much like a high school --in essence, he wanted to dumb it down even further, make it more nurturing and counseling-oriented.

Ben F, Thank goodness for teachers like you that see the good in the standards and use that as defense for our students! I truly wish that our schools were populated by teachers with your dedication/perspective. If so, we probably would not have this difficulty in enabling our students to learn well.

But I have seen too many bad/ineffective programs be justified and promoted in schools because they "align with the standards". This is *not* how our schools will become substantially better. We need methods to make the average teacher, extraordinary. (With curricula and real, positive, and specific instructional techniques as they do in the top performing countries around the world.) This is not something that is present in the vast majority of our schools, today. And with this mantra that standards will cure all, everybody is ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the corner (curricula) that truly does make a difference in student learning.

And if you look around you, how many teachers are able to do what you do? That is: 1) know what should be taught, 2) assemble their own materials so that their students are not subjected to the bland and ineffective textbooks/materials that are generally adopted by schools and 3) work around ineffective school administrators to ensure that students learn what they should?

I fear that that number is too low to count.

Erin, you are absolutely right. Bland textbook aligned with standards = righteous curriculum in the minds of 99.9% of educators. "Aligned with standards" ends debate about curriculum. Standards are like a torpedo fish: they stun the mind and prevent it from developing a clear conception of quality education. I really appreciate your lucid and incisive analysis. Please keep it up!

Ben F, We have a mutual admiration society here. My difficulty with standards is not the idea of standards nor of the idea of the federalization of the standards.

My difficulty arises from the simple fact that standards have been largely ineffective in spurring improvements in student learning.

I live in CA and despite having the best standards in the country have been largely unimpressed with the quality of the textbooks and assessments that have been produced and used on our students. And I have been extremely concerned with the rhetoric that keeps blaming teachers for every ill that goes wrong with our schools.

I am glad to hear that you have tried hard to use the standards to our students advantage. But realistically, improvements in student learning will not happen under a standards+testing+accountabilty approach because there is *no* incentive to produce better materials or better approaches to teaching. (It is much easier to fire "bad" teachers.)

Please consider this support for your great work in helping your kids to learn well. But standards will never enable the vast majority of kids to do well because they are being used, mistakenly, to support the status quo; and not support the new, innovative and better ways to teaching our kids.

Ben and Erin--I certainly agree with your belief that "alignment" in itself doesn't mean much of anything. We can "align" lousy tests with great standards and wholly forget curriculum. Or we can align lousy curriculum with great standards but forget any support for teachers. 

But, in the absence of very good standards, it can be all the harder to create excellent tests, excellent curricula and excellent resources for teachers and students. That ends up being the luck of the draw, and the poorest students generally draw the shortest straws. While great standards can be used to support a pallid status quo, I don't see why they HAVE to. That, alas, is a political problem, and it will find an equally ugly--or perhaps even uglier--form in the absence of standards. There's much innovation that can occur with strong standards.

Claus, Are our schools any better at educating students now than they were in the pre-Standards era? (NAEP suggests that the answer is no.) What great new curricula/textbooks/instructional approaches has been developed since the advent of standards?

"in the absence of very good standards, it can be all the harder to create excellent tests, excellent curricula and excellent resources for teachers and students."

The best curricula that I am aware of (Core Knowledge, Core Knowledge Early Literacy, Singapore math) were developed outside the "standards" movement. So no, standards are not necessary for developing good curricula.

How are the tests that we have now (with the state standards) substantially different than the Iowa Basic Skills or the NAEP? Clearly, tests have been around much longer than "standards". So how has "standards" made the tests any better?

I would have hoped that "standards" would have spurred innovation and improvements in student learning. And yet, they have not.

With the substantial amount of data supporting the fact that standards have failed to improve student learning, how is it possible that anyone can see this as a viable ed reform policy lever?

The downside to promoting standards is that it distracts the ed reform discussion from policies that do have data to suggest that they could in fact improve student learning (e.g. curricular reforms, specific course syllabi plus external exams similar to the AP courses, etc.).