(NAME-MCE) Panel Proposes Single Standard for All Schools

[Anselmo Villanueva]

Panel Proposes Single Standard for All Schools

By SAM DILLON  March 10, 2010   New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/education/11educ.html?th&emc=th

A panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school
superintendents proposed a uniform set of academic standards on Wednesday,
laying out their vision for what all the nation’s public school children
should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high
school graduation.

The new proposals could transform American education, replacing the
patchwork of standards ranging from mediocre to world-class that have been
written by local educators in every state.

Under the proposed standards for English, for example, fifth graders would
be expected to explain the differences between drama and prose, and to
identify elements of drama like characters, dialogue and stage directions.
Seventh graders would study, among other math concepts, proportional
relationships, operations with rational numbers and solutions for linear
equations.

The new standards are likely to touch off a vast effort to rewrite
textbooks, train teachers and produce appropriate tests, if a critical mass
of states adopts them in coming months, as seems likely. But there could be
opposition in some states, like Massachusetts, which already has high
standards that advocates may want to keep.

“I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years
in American education,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant
secretary of education who has been an advocate for national standards for
nearly two decades. “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.”

In recent years, many states moved in the opposite direction, lowering
standards to make it easier for students to pass tests and for schools to
avoid penalties under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law.

After educators, business executives and others criticized the corrosive
impact of a race to the bottom, the National Governors Association and the
Council of Chief State School Officers set the common-standards initiative
in motion last year. They convened panels of English and math experts from
the College Board and A.C.T., and from Achieve Inc., a group with years of
experience working to upgrade  graduation standards.

Alaska and Texas are the only states that declined to participate in the
standards-writing effort. In keeping his state out, Gov. Rick Perry argued
that only Texans should decide what children there learn.

The Obama administration quickly endorsed the effort. Under the Department
of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, in which states are competing for
a share of $4 billion in school improvement money, states can earn 40 points
of the possible 500 for participating in the common effort and adopting the
new standards. Under current law, there is no penalty for states that choose
not to participate.

The standards are open for public comment through April 2, before final
versions are published later in the spring.

Kentucky, working with a draft, last month became the first state to
formally adopt the standards. The state said it would train teachers to the
standards this summer and begin teaching them this fall. Officials in
Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina and other states have
begun laying the groundwork for adoption, said Dane Linn, the education
division director at the National Governors Association.

The adoption process varies greatly from state to state. In some, the state
schools superintendent has considerable power to move forward in as little
as three months. But other states, including California, have complicated
procedures, involving the state board of education and other bodies that
could prolong the process for a year or more, Mr. Linn said.

Educators and officials involved in the writing process pointed to what they
considered to be strengths in the proposed standards, including that they
are concise.

“Many states have too many expectations in their academic standards that
force teachers to cover too much in a superficial way,” said Gene Wilhoit,
executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. “We said:
‘Let’s keep these very understandable and at a number that is manageable.
Let’s not put on teachers more requirements than they can deliver.’ ”

Another improvement over current state benchmarks, people involved in the
initiative said, is that the proposed standards are what educators call
vertically aligned, meaning that material students are to learn in early
years builds a foundation for what is to come in the next grade.

“Students are asked to do progressively more challenging things, and
although that may sound obvious, it’s a real breakthrough,” said Michael
Cohen, an Education Department official in the Clinton administration who is
president of Achieve.

But not everyone was so enthusiastic.

“We’re not at all satisfied,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of the
Pioneer Institute, a Boston nonprofit group that helped Massachusetts revise
its state benchmarks in the 1990s. “Ours in Massachusetts are much higher,
so why should we adopt these?” Mr. Stergios also criticized the three-week
public comment period.

“When was the last time you saw a national effort that was rammed through in
three weeks?” he asked.

The United States Chamber of Commerce, the American Federation of Teachers,
the National Association of State Boards of Education, and a string of other
business and education groups immediately endorsed the draft standards. The
Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s largest
urban public school systems, called the standards “high quality
grade-by-grade standards that the nation can be proud of.”

They outline concepts to be learned, but do not lay down a specific
curriculum.

In English, for instance, they do not prescribe individual works of
literature, but instead suggest texts illustrating the quality and
complexity of student reading appropriate for various grades. The middle
school list includes “Little Women” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” as
well as works of nonfiction like “Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the
Underground Railroad,” by Ann Petry. The 11th-grade nonfiction list includes
Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Because the standards cover only English and math, their writers did not
include proposals related to evolution, a cause of controversy in some
states, or to any other specific science concepts.

Since the late 1980s, many educators and policy makers have considered the
current system of state standards a weak link in American education. Because
the standards vary so widely, standardized tests keyed to them are not
comparable from state to state, nor to national tests. Eighty-seven percent
of Tennessee students scored at or above the proficiency level in math on
state tests in 2005, for instance, while 21 percent did so on the federal
math test.

Efforts to draft voluntary national standards during the first Bush and
Clinton administrations foundered after conservatives attacked them as
federal meddling in classroom teaching. Because of that tumultuous history,
leaders of the latest effort have defended its state-led nature, despite
frequent endorsements by the Obama administration.

Also, they enlisted considerable help from education groups, including the
National Council of Teachers of English, the National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics and others.

Writers who participated said they had sought to build on the best of what
is already in some states’ standards, while clarifying and simplifying.

“We tried to clean house a bit, keeping only what is most important and most
critical,” said Susan Pimentel, a consultant in New Hampshire who helped
write the English standards.