Teach Effectively!

I took considerable pleasure today in reading an article by Maria Glod of the Washington Post in which she reported about plans to develop national standards in reading and mathematics for students in US schools. In her article, entitled “46 States, D.C. Plan to Draft Common Education Standards,” Ms. Glod described efforts by the governors of most US states to describe a framework of knowledge and skills that would characterize a high-school diplomate who is ready for the world of work or higher education or, ideally, both.

Forty-six states and the District of Columbia today will announce an effort to craft a single vision for what children should learn each year from kindergarten through high school graduation, an unprecedented step toward a uniform definition of success in American schools.

The push for common reading and math standards marks a turning point in a movement to judge U.S. children using one yardstick that reflects expectations set for students in countries around the world at a time of global competition. Today, each state decides what to teach in third-grade reading, fifth-grade math and every other class. Critics think some set a bar so that students can pass tests but, ultimately, are ill-prepared.

Led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the states … are aiming to define a framework of content and skills that meet an overarching goal. When students get their high school diplomas, the coalition says, they should be ready to tackle college or a job. The benchmarks would be “internationally competitive.”

This is a very welcome development. Too many state-generated standards got bogged down in parochial issues, were subject to manipulation, and became little more than a sop for those of us who want to have a consistent metric against which we can judge our students’ learning and, equally importantly, the quality of our schools.

I suspect that this development will be met by hue and cry from those who object to standards. Although the topic of testing for standards merits a more extensive treatment, let me note here that those who object to standards have an opportunity to contribute to the discussion about how to ascertain whether students have learned those things putatively taught in classrooms. If the concern is about the pressure put upon students by these assessments, it’s a good time to recommend multiple opportunities to meet standards, so that not everything rides on one sitting; it’s also an opportunity for teachers to teach students how to relax during testing.

I hasten to note that I do not consider common standards to be the only missing ingredient in securing effective instruction for US students. There are other nuts to crack (selection of instructional methods based on educators’ personal preferences; teacher education programs founded on philosophy and politics, to pick a couple of long-hanging fruits [and mix a metaphor or two]), but this is one of most important ones.

Let’s hope that the development is done with clear eyes, falsifiable argument, and dispatch (though not haste).

Link to Ms. Glod’s article. Also link to “46 States Commit to Common Standards Push” by Michele McNeil in Education Week.

For some previous posts about how states made standards overly flexible, see How low is your state’s bar? (16 Oct 2007) and Varying standards (10 Jun 2007). For additional TE posts about standards in education, see National standards would help US education become more effective (4 Mar 2009) and Not looking at the obvious (9 Feb 2008).