Issues in Education: National Standards
U.S.
educators seek lessons from Scandinavia
Article by Meris Stansbury, eSchoolNews,
March 3, 2008
A
delegation led by the Consortium
for School Networking (CoSN) recently toured Scandinavia in search of
answers for how students in that region of the world were able to score so high
on a recent international test of math and science skills. They found that
educators in
What the CoSN delegation didn’t find in those nations were competitive
grading, standardized testing, and top-down accountability—all staples of the
American education system.
Researchers
Propose NAEP Look Beyond Academic Measures
Article by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, Education
Week, February 27, 2008
The National Assessment of Educational Progress should be broadened to gauge how American youths are faring on a range of academic, social, health, and cultural indicators, contends a report that calls for new measures of educational outcomes and equity.
"Reassessing the Achievement Gap: Fully Measuring What Students Should Be Taught in School" argues that NAEP results offer a “distorted” picture of student achievement because of their exclusive focus on academic skills and take attention away from nontested areas that often fall under the purview of schools.
“When you focus only on basic academic skills, you create incentives to redirect all the attention and resources away from broader goals to narrow academic skills,” said Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “What gets measured gets done. The idea is that we’re not going to restore balance to our schools unless we measure all those things that we expect schools to do.”
A comprehensive assessment of in-school and out-of-school adolescents and young adults could provide a more complete picture of how well schools and other youth-development institutions are preparing them for later success, the report maintains. Such an assessment could be done by expanding NAEP survey questions and reinstating some of the data-collection practices used in the testing program in the 1970s. Those were abandoned largely because of the expense.
The
Case for Multiple Measures
Article by Dan Fuller, Kevin Fitzgerald and Ji
Sun Lee, ASCD, Winter, 2008
Multiple measures of assessment can best be described as a variety of evaluations that measure the performance of students, schools, and school districts. Measures for assessing student achievement could include student grades, student portfolios and exhibitions, teacher evaluations, and student progress and growth. Examples of ways of assessing schools and school districts include student growth measures, advancement rates, attendance records, and graduation rates. Secondary indicators include SAT, advanced placement (AP), and other standardized test scores; number of AP courses offered; and student grades in AP courses.
Under No Child Left Behind, schools are focused on federally dictated, state-developed tests in reading and math. The law requires tests for all students in grades 3–8 in reading and math and a science assessment during high school. Students, schools, school districts, and states are judged on the results of these tests. Generally, the tests are uniform statewide and in multiple-choice format to illustrate adequate yearly progress (AYP), the primary measurement under No Child Left Behind. With the exception of Nebraska, 49 states currently use multiple-choice tests to measure student performance.
These standardized, off-the-shelf-tests provide very little, if any, information to inform learning and teaching. Due to the standardized format, the timing of the tests, and the distribution of results, they offer little in way of diagnosis but have significant weight in labeling the performance of schools and school districts. Under NCLB, many educators have grown concerned that judgments about performance of students, subgroups of students, schools, and districts are based solely on state-approved tests in reading and math.
No single test can tell all there is to know. As the directors of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing emphasize, "Multiple measures are needed to address the full depth and breadth of our expectations for student learning." Beyond the multiple-choice and short-answer items that are typical of current assessments, "other types of performance measures—essays, applied projects, portfolios, demonstrations, oral presentations, etc.—are needed to represent and guide students' progress."
How
Nebraska Leaves No Child Behind
Article by Sonja Steptoe, Time/CNN, May 30, 2007
Most state education officials
grumble that the pressure-packed annual tests and rigid adequate yearly progress
(AYP) targets engendered by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law are
flawed means of measuring student proficiency, raising academic standards,
holding schools accountable and fostering learning. But since the penalty for
defying the law is loss of federal funds, most treat NCLB's prescriptives like
bitter medicine they can't afford to spit out. All, that is, except the
iconoclasts who run the public schools in Nebraska.
One Size Fits Whom?
The core curriculum stymies reform
Commentary by Ronald A. Work, Teacher
Magazine, March 1, 2007
Curriculum is the engine of our public education system. To a large degree it shapes the allocation of financial resources and time, the preparation and assignment of teachers, and the formulation of academic standards and standardized tests. Despite its importance, curriculum doesn’t get much attention from parents, politicians, or the media, except for calls for more rigor and a national curriculum (God forbid). Nearly everybody just accepts curriculum as it’s always been—without questioning whether it is appropriate for a very diverse student body and a high-tech, rapidly changing world.
The standards movement and the increasing emphasis on accountability
(especially since the enactment of No Child Left Behind) tend to make the core
curriculum even more impervious to criticism or change. And that is unfortunate
because the key to significant improvement in student learning might well be a
serious examination of—and national debate about—the traditional core
curriculum.
Statewide teaching strategy
unveiled
Article by Jennifer D. Jordan, The
Providence Journal, February 16, 2007
"For the first time, Rhode
Island has a statewide curriculum in reading, writing and math — a consistent,
uniform learning plan for students in kindergarten through the 12th grade.
Governor Carcieri and state education officials unveiled the Web-based guide
yesterday at Woonsocket High School, calling it the missing piece in Rhode
Island’s education puzzle..."
Benchmarking: What It Is, How
It Works,
and Why Educators Desperately Need It
Commentary by C. Jackson Grayson Jr.,
Education Week, January 31, 2007
"Arthur C. Clarke, the great science fiction writer, once observed that cave dwellers froze to death on beds of coal - lying on the very resource that could have saved their lives. But they had no way to find the coal, mine it, or use it. Today, several millennia later, the same phenomenon is happening again - this time, in education.
"America's K-12 education
system is asleep on beds of best practices. They come from thousands of workable
solutions that exist right now - down the hall, across the district, across the
nation. Like coal to the cavemen, however, these best practices are hidden,
untapped and unmined..."
"Why Thinking 'Outside the Box" Is Not So Easy"
(And Why Present Reform Efforts Will Fail)
Commentary by Marion Brady,
Education Week, August 30, 2006
"Of all the education-related unexamined assumptions, none is more deeply embedded than the belief that the main business of schooling is to teach the “core curriculum”—math, science, social studies, and language arts. Supporting that belief is another assumption: that these four fields of study are the only, or at least the optimum, organizers of general knowledge.
"That last assumption is so powerful it shapes education worldwide. At all levels, from middle through graduate school, the four areas of study are the main institutional organizers. So taken for granted is it that they are the fundamental building blocks of education, that reform movements don’t question their centrality. Separate sets of “standards” reinforce them. “Measures of accountability” are keyed to them. Even those who know that knowledge is seamless, who know that the walls between fields of study are artificial and arbitrary, tend to assume that the four are the ultimate organizers of knowledge....
School, finally, isn’t about disciplines and subjects, but about what they were originally meant to do—help the young make more sense of life, more sense of experience, more sense of an unknowable future. And in that sense-making effort, math, science, social studies, and language arts simply aren’t up to the challenge. They’ve given us a curriculum so deeply flawed it’s an affront to the young and a recipe for societal disaster."
For discussion of this issue, please visit this Education Week webpage: http://www.edweek.org/tb/2006/08/29/939.html