Nationally people have wondered why are we falling behind the rest of the world? What are we doing wrong in the U.S.? Many solutions have been offered to this problem:
"We need a longer school day or school year." Interesting when many districts in all states are considering 4 day school weeks to try and save money.
"We need more accountability, high stakes testing, grade level testing before advancement." Places have been doing this, especially increased testing. Has this worked? No. If you ask most teachers they would tell you that every time another assessment is added, instructional time decreases. Is this really the best way to make our students more competitive on the international level?
"We need highly qualified educators." Yes I would agree that the most qualified should be teaching our kids, but is anyone every going to decide what "highly qualified" means? The State Department of Education, our State Universities, and our administrations & steering committees, all answer the "highly qualified" question differently. Maybe once "highly qualified" has a meaningful definition it might start to make a difference.
So what is the problem? Standards.
I recently spoke to a middle school math teacher and asked her what the difference was between students now and students 10-15 years ago. She told me that they don't know basic facts & they know math concepts only at the most superficial level. I asked her how this happened? She told me that kids never masteedr these basic math concepts. She said that she spends most of her year catching them up to where they should've been when the year started, instead of getting them to where they need to be before they leave for H.S.
How did this happen? The answer once again is, standards.
Once standards became vast, we started to loose the depth in which we teach concepts. Our state standards are long, but not deep. Why touch upon 32 concepts in the course of the year when you could master 7? Furthermore, we preach engaging students through innovation, re-teaching the same things year after year will lead to student disinterest and frustration.
We need to make a decision in our state, will our kids be jack of all trades and masters of none, or will they be innovative, engaged, experts in the fundamentals.
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The reality is that the creation of standards, as we currently know them, has led to an inability to create a curriculum which addresses a limited number of topics in depth. The demand to cover an increasingly large range of topics has led to a superficial learning on the part of our students. It is possible to narrow down what we teach to a few topics, spending a larger allotment of time on each and getting in depth so that students develop a true understanding. Providing students with the tools needed to develop higher order thinking skills can only be accomplished when we provide them with the time necessary to make connections and apply the knowledge which they have been exposed to.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the standards movement has distracted educators (and others) from keeping an eye on the bigger picture—the overall curriculum. Standards per se aren't the problem...except having some agreement of which standards we should focus on is critical, I believe.
ReplyDeleteBut standards and attempting to be accountable for meeting them (testing of various sorts!) has taken too many educators out of the forest and into the trees. We aren't paying attention to the big picture.
Another essential question...how does all of this relate to This We Believe in a middle level context?
Joe, your question at the end of your post is a powerful one. How do we answer it?
And now with the advent of the proposed national standards in math and English...will they help or hinder this problem?
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