Dave Schechter
CNN Senior National Editor
While the kids, most of them anyway, are on summer vacation, here’s an issue to consider: Has the time passed when it makes sense for each state to have its own standards for what children are taught in grades K-12?
The kids may not be thinking about school, but state education officials across the country face an August due date (some no doubt will ask for an extension) on whether to accept a proposed set of national standards for core subjects – English language arts, history, social studies, science and math, with goals specified by grade and subject. You can read them here.
Growing up in Illinois, we studied Abraham Lincoln. It makes sense to learn your state’s history. But shouldn’t students from Maine to California, from Washington to Florida, be at par with each other on the core subjects?
Once upon a time the American population was less mobile, less urban. After World War II, America was on the move; out of the small towns, into the cities, expanding the suburbs. Companies opened more offices in more states. Today, unlike the generations before them, Gen X and Millenials expect to hold multiple jobs in their lifetimes. Employers don’t want to worry that job-seekers from a particular state are not properly educated.
The proposed standards, Sam Dillon wrote in The New York Times “would replace the nation’s motley current checkerboard of locally written standards, which vary greatly in content and sophistication.”
“I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education,” Chester Finn, Jr., a former assistant secretary of education during the Reagan administration, told The Times. “Now we have the possibility that, for the first time, states could come together around new standards and high school graduation requirements that are ambitious and coherent. This is a big deal.”
A university in New York would welcome applicants from schools in New Mexico to New Hampshire, confident that those students had received the same basic education. That’s why officials from 48 of the 50 states (all but Alaska and Texas), two territories and the District of Columbia endorsed writing standards that would be “aligned with college and work expectations.”
The proposal has plenty of critics. Some fear national standards would amount to a federal takeover of the K-12 classroom, further reducing local input. Advocates for the arts and physical education decry that those subjects are not included. In terms of politics, critics contend that there is nothing voluntary about the standards; complaining that the Obama administration ties them to a state’s chances of receiving “Race to the Top” money.
A report by the Heritage Foundation, a politically conservative think tank, concedes that: “On the one hand, such a critique of the status quo is well founded. Parental empowerment is essential and currently lacking. The monopoly that is the public education system must be more accountable to parents and taxpayers. Too many students leave high school without basic knowledge or skills.” But the Heritage report also maintains: “On the other hand, national standards and testing are unlikely to overcome these deficiencies. These problems are too deeply ingrained in the power and incentive structure of the public education system. A national standards debate threatens to distract from these fundamental issues. Centralized standard-setting would force parents and other taxpayers to relinquish one of their most powerful tools for school improvement: control of the academic content, standards, and testing through their state and local policymakers. Moreover, it is unclear that national standards would establish a target of excellence rather than standardization, a uniform tendency toward mediocrity and information that is more useful to bureaucrats who distribute funding than it is to parents who are seeking to direct their child's education.
So, what do you think: Should the states adopt national standards for core subjects?
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National standards would be great if the standards weren't clouded with political agenda. Pres Bush's "No Child Left Behind" is a disaster that was put into place for the pure benefit of underaccomplished rich kids. Plain and simple. So now, the private school kids can get all the funding while the public school kids, who now have to share their classroom with lower functioning, special education students, suffer. Its not fair. But sure, the concept is great if someone like Ms. Rhea in DC is the one in charge, not some side talking politician.
Anderson,
It is not only time for National Education Standards, but to review all manner of state laws and provide national law instaed.
State Education is becoming an oxymoron if the Religiuos Right Wingers can interject creationism in place of Evolution.
In the same way, many states have "Blue" laws that are patently unjust and technically unconstitutional. These laws need to be removed from the books and have constitutionally acceptable Federal law that supersedes them.
Law that has ANY basis in Religion is one category; abortion law, liquor law, etc are another.
Does the average American have any idea of what is being required of teachers now in the classroom. In the name of "Standards-Based Education" teachers are having to post a standard and an "essential question" and vocabulary words even in kindergarten. They have to be large enough to be "read" from across the room even though most kindergarten students cannot read them. They basically take up a whole bulletin board and have to be changed weekly or more often and include at least 3 subjects. Then the vocabulary words have to be moved to a separate bulletin board for review for the rest of the year. Then during the school year, the teachers have to be ready at any moment for visitors to "walk-through" and examine all those postings, make sure you are doing exactly what your schedule and lesson plan says you will be doing at that moment in time and that whatever it is you are doing, that it matches the standard that you have posted for that subject. In addition, weekly lesson plans are approximately 6 pages long and have to have all of that stuff included in them, as well. People who are getting paid a whole lot more money than teachers spend our money and their time coming up with this stuff and then it gets passed down to the teacher. A tremendous amount of human resources are being wasted with this dog and pony show and it is of no benefit to the student unless you have an ineffective teacher to begin with. We say, administrators are paid to deal with the ineffective teachers; require them to do their jobs- they make 6 figures. Instead, they have come up with more layers and layers of bureaucracy that waste time, adds stress and will definitely result in teachers leaving the profession in droves.
Teachers working under these requirements can no longer be creative or take advantage of teachable moments or really even "meet the children" where they are at any given time. We are told specifically that we are not allowed to teach anything that is not a standard.
Those of you in any other profession, would you like to work under these conditions? Can you imagine having to post exactly what you are doing each day and being required to stick to it by a schedule and a weekly plan? It will prove to be detrimental to U.S. Education.
regarding education:
Why do we concentrate on changing the expensive things...
We could use comic books to teach children to read, which I am sure most children would love.
We could use building plans that are the same for each grade of schools,reducing the expense for drawing up new plans for each school...a needless expense in my opinion.
We could show movies of Shakespeare plays so that all children would get the benefits of the plays (not just the ones who really read the plays).
I'm sure there are many more ideas if we just brainstorm. By the way, my two children both grew up to be teachers and neither one enjoyed school.
Little changes mean a lot!
I here nothing about increasing the salaries for teachers, my Sister is a teacher and it is the lowest paid profession that we have to date. We have lost many quified caring teachers because they just cannot afford to be in an educational profession. I think the promise that Obama made to increase teachers salaries needs to be part of any standards we adopt
I think the problem needs to be re-framed. We currently push our kids through the school system lock-step by age, passing from grade to grade. Each teacher has to deal with the whole spectrum of abilities, and often teaching is geared to the slowest students to avoid high failure rates. The school systems need to shift from a grade level based system to an subject ability based system. In such a system, the student can take whatever level of material they can handle, on a subject by subject basis. A student good at English might be in the English level 4 class, while in math they might be in the Math level 2 class. In each subject, they would be taught with others at the same level, at a pace where they can progress. Graduation would be based on achieving some composite measure of overall knowledge.
In the current system if the kid didn't master basic English or math skills, they still get pushed into the higher grade level classes, trying to build their academic houses on weak (or no) foundations. In a subject level based system, there would be no "gaps" because they would be taught at the level they operate on. In addition, the teachers would deal with all their students working on about the same level, simplifying lesson plans and allowing them to focus on the needs of all students, not just the "slow" ones in the class. In terms of efficiency and effectiveness, this would work much better than the current system, as it naturally tailors the subject material to the skills of the student. Finally, it would free up our brightest children to go as far as they are capable of, enabling our country to produce more desperately needed engineers, doctors and scientists.
This is not a radical idea. Montessori schools have been using this approach with great effect in this country for decades. Several school districts that were failing have tried this approach and have experienced great success, turning teachers that were skeptics into believers. If we really want to improve our educational system, we must get away from the "one size fits all" grade level based system in use now. The only thing that system really has going for it is that it is what we have always done, and so we are comfortable with it. Even so, that system is demonstrably broken, and it is time for a new approach.
I think we need to begin pulling kids away from standardized testing. Stop regulating teachers and forcing them to follow "script" rules. It will be hard, but some teachers just don't care, they need to be weeded out. there is no easy answer, but our nation's education system is struggling and we need passionate teachers, more free thought, and better peoples skills. and i guess math and science skills as well