The Standards Debate

Most standards seem like common sense. Good teachers don’t have to look up standards to find out what kids in their courses should accomplish. Standards are often numbered lists of desired outcomes, not how to get the outcome, or what to do beyond mastery. Even though the standards movement has been going on for some time, we keep hearing that we aren’t making progress in our schools. Is the problem that standards aren’t national, or it is something else? Maybe we are too busy looking up standards, teaching to the standards, and testing to see if students are achieving standard level? Standards focus upon the bottom line, the minimum acceptable. Perhaps that’s the problem? As we look to new models, core standards, and grants for improving education, we need to think about whether our proposed standards and testing programs will measure what they need to measure to help us improve education. Robert Pondiscio comments in The Core Knowledge Blog, “Find one single teacher drawing breath that needed a secretive committee of two dozen experts to tell her that high school students ought to be able to ‘discern the most important ideas, events, or information, and summarize them accurately and concisely.’  This is not a standard, it’s a platitude.” You’ll find educators who believe the idea of standardizing standards stifling, and you’ll find educators who suggest that standards by themselves without a roadmap to achieving them, won’t work. Consider Core Standard #12 under Writing for College and Career Readiness: “Use technology as a tool to produce, edit and distribute writing.” No educator would disagree with that. It’s common sense in today’s world. Do we need someone tell us that our students should be able to use tech as a tool in writing? If we do, we are in big trouble. Take a look at the revised draft of ‘Common Core Standards. You have until 10/21/09 to submit your feedback on them.