Wed 30 Jun, 2010
National Standards: The Other Side of the Coin
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In the last post from Eduskeptic, the establishment of national standards for schools across the nation were discussed. In general, it may be a good idea, on several different levels. When the states apply for educational funding from the Federal government, it would be nice to know that the scores were based on the same criteria, that the criteria were assessed in the same manner, and the scoring itself was an equal opportunity proposition. As of now, that premise is doubtful at best.
While a case can be made for national educational standards across the K-12 spectrum, the rule of unintended consequences will undoubtedly apply, no matter what. It always does. The other side of national testing, the tricky part, needs close scrutiny, at least as close as the standards themselves. If teacher pay and retention is to be tied to the students success with the standards, someone has to pay attention to the process that takes place.
Teaching to the test is not new. It is what educators have done since the beginning of the educational business. How can it be otherwise? A teacher has a text, or expectations, that drive the teaching of the curriculum on a daily basis. If the expectation is that the students will understand the sound of the letter L, it makes perfectly good sense to focus on the letter L and the sound that it makes. After sufficient time dwelling upon this sound, the test is simple: what sound does the letter L make? Follow up is likewise pretty straight forward: in several different words, which ones start with the sound of the letter L? It would be completely counterintuitive to spend a week with the letter Q, then test for the letter L. Not too difficult to understand. There are some things that lend themselves rather well to this model. It is teaching to the test in a pretty pure form.
Once the varied sets of sounds, math formulas, and steps to get the right measurements and quantities is mastered, things do become more difficult. In any part of the curriculum, at least from about 4th grade on up (4th grade is the first year of mostly pure content teaching. Skills based curricula is a K through 3rd grade experience), content becomes the focus. Students should already know the alphabet, how to read, and a bucketful of math facts. Content is a different world altogether, but it is dependent upon the successful acquisition of the necessary skills. Content lends itself to interpretation.
Written papers begin to appear in earnest in 4th grade, and then blossom into a full bore flood after that, all the way to the end of the University years. Papers are written for every subject within the curricula strata. Some of the information that is taught isn’t open to very much, if at all, interpretation. Some historical dates are relatively cast in stone, as are some things that have happened in the various disciplines. It is not quite as easy to adequately grade the way things are written about. Teachers all hope for competent usage of the written language. After that, it gets dicey, which is to say, subjective. The various bits of scientific discoveries are not at all always consistent with what the text book may say. While Marie Curie was busy discovering radioactivity, she was in the process of killing herself with her experiments. Text books used to focus on the wonders of radiation, not so much on what happened to Marie. Perhaps they still do.
In a paper about Marie Curie, what is to be showcased? How does a teacher go about grading two equally good compositions about her, written from two perspectives that are completely at odds with each other? Does the science teacher grade differently from the history teacher, who has a different outlook than the English teacher, regarding the assignment? History is largely, in this writers opinion, distorted very badly in the K-12 curricula. Who’s version are we writing about? Is one version more wrong than another? In the realm of English, is Shakespeare really that good? Are “be” verbs all that insidious? Is there really only one way to solve a problem in the world of math? Is science a closed loop, with only one answer per question?
In a standardized testing situation, with standardized scoring, there is only one answer per question. This would indicate that the students have to be asked to memorize pre-sorted facts, which can then be sorted out on a bubbleized scantron card. Fill in the correct bubble, and move on. At the end of the test, the card goes into the scantron reader, and a numerical score is produced. What this measures, and all that it measures, is the ability to memorize the material that is pertinent to the test, and which can be scored with fill in bubbles. Math may be different, as a student may actually have to solve a problem to get to the right bubble on the card. Of course, since there are only 4 or 5 answers to choose from, getting close may be all that is needed.
If the nations teachers are going to be held accountable for great scantron scores in order to stay employed, or to move up, or down, on the salary scale, it becomes important to focus on the presumed correct answers. In fact, there have already been instances where teachers have been accused of cheating on this type of scoring, in order to reach the correct numerical strata in order to be judged a “good” teacher. Herein lies the problem, and this may be the dark side of national standards and testing. If the teaching day focuses on only the correct set of, or acceptable set of, answers to a nationally standardized test, it is more about the teacher than the student and what and how the student learns. The restrictions are enormous in this scenario.
The actual art of teaching takes a clear back seat to the mechanical recitation of someones version of facts. This, in and of itself, in this teachers view, is not good. The wide based critical thinking skills that are a hallmark of teaching in the United States, and which have proved to be pretty important, won’t survive in this type of atmosphere. Rote recitation is not education, it is not learning.
Somewhere there is an answer to this conundrum. Somewhere, either at the national level, in Arne Duncan’s group in the Department of Education, or in the staff room of the local elementary school, there is someone who should be able to figure out how to mesh actual learning with a set of national standards and standardized testing that will be acceptable across the educational spectrum. This will only happen if Duncan et al reach out to the educational professionals who actually spend time in classrooms. The theoreticians are useful as well, as are the sociologists, as this is not just a question that centers only in the classroom. It will take the involvement of more than just teachers to make all of this work. After 36 years of teaching, I have to hope that it does work.
One Response to “National Standards: The Other Side of the Coin”
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David says:
National standards? What national standards? With 50 different state departments of education, the District of Columbia, and assorted U.S. territories, we have a hodgepodge of benchmark expectations that are not consistent across state or territorial lines.
How high should our standards be? Which instructional objectives should be taught at each grade level? What are the core competencies for each subject area?
At a March 2010 meeting with state governors and education officials, President Obama observed, “Today’s system of 50 different sets of benchmarks for academic success means fourth grade readers in Mississippi are scoring nearly 70 points lower than students in Wyoming — and they’re getting the same grade. …”
The problem with establishing a national standard is that the 10th Amendment of our Constitution says that powers not granted to the national government nor prohibited to the states by the Constitution of the United States are reserved to the states or the people.
The right to control what is taught in our schools is considered a fundamental “state’s right.”
In recent years the Federal government has eroded this right. How did they do this? George Bush did an end run around the 10th Amendment by tying Federal funding to state participation in standardized testing. Any state which chose not to implement standardized testing would lose millions of dollars in Federal funding.
What happened?
Accountability has become the watchword of the past decade. In some states, like Texas, where the entire concept of accountability began under Governor George Bush, education has devolved into a “teach to the test” mentality. Not only did we teach and test and teach and test and teach and test … but each time we tested, we had to identify which objectives each student passed and which objectives each student failed. My district required teachers to document how each student did on each practice test. We were also required to document how we would reteach lessons that specific students had failed.
I finally left the field of elementary education (and eventually became a chef instructor) after I lost interest in teaching. I opted out of elementary ed because I no longer felt like a teacher. I felt like an educational accountant.
With this being said, I must admit to being a Federalist with regards to the creation of national standards. I think we should emulate the French. The French government defines the standards for something like 75% of the national curriculum and individual regions then define the remaining standards. By doing this, the national government has defined the core instructional objectives that will be taught. The reason that regional areas are allowed input is because this allows education to be adopted to the needs of a community. Students in rural areas for example, may study agriculture or animal husbandry while students in industrialized areas can study welding or mechanics.
Without a national standard, students who move across state lines are likely to develop gaps in their education. I am certainly a case in point. As a child, I attended a private school in Arizona, a public school in Georgia, and international American schools in Ghana, Thailand, and El Salvador.
Although I had a great cultural experience, the problem with moving from school to school across state and national borders is that my high school education was filled with The end result is that my secondary education was top heavy soft sciences … psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The only science classes I was able to take were geology and biology. I never had the opportunity to take physics or chemistry.
Why should any of this matter?
When my father wanted me to follow in his footsteps and attend medical school, I became an undergrad premed student. I lasted for one semester. Without high school chemistry, I lacked the prerequisites to pass chemistry 101 in college. The fact that our teaching assistant was a German who spoke very little English did not help …
George Bush said that he wanted a level playing field by having accountable standards … but whose standards are we using? And how can our playing field be level when school funding from property tax dollars differs between high poverty inner city areas, affluent suburbs, and rural communities?
How can we expect students to learn if they have no adult role models in their lives? How can we learn if they’re hungry or abused? Would you believe that some kids are even homeless? How can we expect a student to learn if the child in question is busy wondering where he’ll sleep tonight and whether he’ll have anything to eat before he goes to bed?
The issue of “accountability” must be tied to a war on crime and poverty.
Please understand that I am not advocating a socialist system of government. The problem with the socialists is that they’ve forgotten that people have an inherent, “What’s in it for me” motivation. Socialist economies breed a sense of entitlement because there are no expectations for individual performance. The worker who is dutiful and diligent and hardworking makes the same amount of money as the worker who is lazy, careless, and late.
What I am saying is that the playing field as it exists today, is not even close to being level. In order for all students to have the opportunity to benefit from education, they need to have their basic minimum needs met. All students need food, clothing, and shelter. I also think they need to feel safe and they need to feel loved.
If there is any doubt that some students are less equal than others, look at Detroit which has an abysmal 25% rate of graduation.