What are Educational Standards?
(From www.corestandards.org)
"Educational standards are the learning goals for what students should know and be able to do at each grade level.
Education standards, …are not a curriculum.
Local communities and educators choose their own curriculum, which is a detailed plan for day to day teaching.
In other words, the (standards are) what students need to know and be able to do, and curriculum is how students will learn it."
So, what's different about this today? Haven't we always had learning goals and objectives tied to the curriculum at each grade level?
Certainly. For example, these have always been featured in the opening pages of teacher's editions of textbooks as the "scope and sequence" of the instruction.
What is "Scope and Sequence?"
The scope of the textbook consists of a listing of all the topics presented. It indicates both the breadth and depth of the concepts.
The sequence is the order in which the topics are presented. The sequence is usually determined by the prior knowledge that a learner must have before they will be able to fully appreciate the topic being presented.
What is the Problem with Standards?
The problem with standards is that they are tied to specific grade levels. "You are in the 4th grade. You are expected to learn all of this by the end of the year."
The problem, simply stated, is that when students are grouped for instruction based only on their date of birth, the entire purpose of scope and sequence is ignored. Students who have not become proficient in prerequisite learning objectives are put at a huge disadvantage compared to those who have mastered the previous learning.
If standards were not tied to grade specific levels, they would be pretty much equivalent to the old scope and sequence tools that we've always used.
Of course, scope and sequence itself has long been associated with grade levels, because that's the way we've done is for over a century now. One might say that the development of grade level standards is a natural extension of the scope and sequence methods of the past.
If scope and sequence were not tied to grade levels, but were a continuous, unbroken flow of learning experience, we would liberate students from failure, and would give them open access to learning as quickly as they can while taking as much time as they need to be become proficient in essential learnings.
What is the Purpose of Educational Standards
From the California State Board of Education website: "Content standards were designed to encourage the highest achievement of every student, by defining the knowledge, concepts, and skills that students should acquire at each grade level."
What exactly does the above statement mean? It seems to suggest that the standards are set at a level that every student at any grade level is expected to meet.
If that is the case, then isn't it also expected that every student entering a grade level is expected to already be proficient in the standards of all their previous instruction?
Does that sound realistic to you?
If we backward engineer that thought, the clear implication is that, for example, all five-year-old children who enter Kindergarten
are expected to be developmentally, cognitively, and emotionally ready for the learning experiences presented from thereon.
Does that sound realistic to you?
Although it might be included in the idea of cognitively ready, we should specifically point to the vast amount
of learning that a child may bring to their first day of school by virtue of their experiences in early childhood.
The characteristics of their language development and the life experiences that shape their body of knowledge, skills,
and understanding of the world around them would have to be reasonably similar for every child to start their first day of school on equal footing.
Does that sound realistic to you?
Standards: Who and How?
Let's go back to the California Board of Education statement above: "Content standards were designed…" Designed by whom, and more importantly, how were they designed?
It's the how we must be concerned with. Let's give content and standards developers the benefit of the doubt and say that they are eminent experts
in their fields, and that they are also experts in human cognitive development, or they have those experts at their disposal to guide their work.
An important question is: "Are the grade level standards designed so that the average in that grade can successfully reach proficiency?"
If that is that case then, the standards are designed to guarantee failure to reach proficiency for nearly half our students.
The other side of that coin is that nearly half of our students are being held back from continuous progress while they are waiting for the "average" child to reach proficiency.
If we put the bar of rigor on a sliding scale, the numbers might improve for one half of our students while they are getting worse for the other half.
Clearly, this is not a design that will bring achievement and a love of learning to all.
