<p>I'm opening up this thread for those who want to discuss national standards the NYT article), not to discuss whether 18-year-olds think formal education is necessary. I'd like a focused discussion, not a hijacked discussion. I guess I'm particularly interested in hearing from three camps:</p>
<p>(1) those who have lived in several states while their children were of school age, and what they saw in variations and how that affected their children (or didn't).</p>
<p>(2) those who live or have lived in a state in which the parents responding were quite disappointed in the standards (or in reverse, pleased with the standards)</p>
<p>(3) those who have lived abroad and may have experienced more uniform standards.</p>
<p>States (and in many cases, individual school districts) invested a huge amount of time crafting unique standards. I participated in that process in our state, and unfortunately we frequently ended up with standards statements that were motherhood and apple pie but which were not testable. “Students should understand and appreciate literature as an expression of human experience.” Subsequently benchmarks were added in for grades 4, 8, 12 in our state (you were supposed to interpolate the rest, I guess) and they often – but not always – had a lot of specificity. But when you compare the standards in California, Virginia, Colorado, and Texas you still see huge variances in what is expected. As schools and districts began breaking down the 4th grade benchmarks and distributing sub-benchmarks to K, 1, 2, 3 there were extended arguments about what, in fact, was appropriate as objectives for kindergarten. That was a battle. Overall in our (relatively small) state, I’d guess that well over 40,000 hours of time went into the original standards and benchmarks development and for the most part, that time could have been better spent in many other areas.</p>
<p>When the Fordham Foundation folks graded all of the state standards around ten years ago, they found that the expectations varied hugely state by state, often in completely inexplicable ways. Mass. & Virginia were considered to have the top standards in English, but not top standards in a number of other areas. </p>
<p>Rather than every state going through this battle individually, I’d be happy to see a nationwide set of standards and benchmarks, and let teachers and schools get back to the important work of crafting units and lessons that help students meet those benchmarks. Other than state history, I’m hard pressed to think of a reason why the standard for mathematics in Colorado would need to be different than the standard for mathematics in California.</p>
<p>^Even with state history the standard could be students will study State and local History in grade 4. Students will become familiar with first hand sources available at their local library (photo files, newspapers on microfiche, old maps etc). You can even decide what grade to do local history, so that a kid who has moved to a different state has learned the tools of local history even if they know more about say, Ellis Island than California Missions.</p>
<p>I’m a big fan of National Standards and I even thought the Cultural Literacy book made a fair amount of sense, though we could argue about what it takes to be culturally literate.</p>
<p>As far as my experience with different curricula - I’ve had it all!</p>
<p>Kindergarten: Japanese
1st-3rd grade: International school, mostly British books, learned italics before cursive
4th-5th grade: homeschool/one room school house. Used Greater Cleveland New math curriculum - lots of set theory. Some curriculum from Calvert, but my Mom got bored with it and switched to doing her own thing.
6th grade: International school, mostly American books - horrible readers, math was easy after math with my Mom!
7th-8th grade: big DC public school
9th-12th grade: private prep school</p>
<p>I studied the Egyptians way more often than I needed to when switching around schools. </p>
<p>I only skimmed the proposed standards - my one worry is not recognizing that many kindergartners are simply not ready for reading. I had one who taught himself at two and another who finally got it in 2nd grade. They both became avid readers - with perfect and nearly perfect CR scores. I certainly have no problem agreeing that third graders should be able to multiply and read books like Charlotte’s Web.</p>
<p>I do worry that we’ll get into religion wars about all of this, having read the long New York Times magazine article about the battles over the Texas social studies curriculum.</p>
<p>So far, I’m pleased to see greater emphasis on literature (and its disciplines) sooner rather than later. This is something severely lacking in my State. </p>
<p>The concerns about kindergarten reading readiness are valid, and the whole unrealistic approach to reading readiness is an extremely volatile issue in my region, led by boards and politicians unacquainted with the reading process. Hopefully, this one can be modified.</p>
<p>^^ And I believe one of the new education initiatives of the Obama administration is to increase Pre-K funding right? or did I make that up? Pre-K is so, so important for getting kids ready for school.</p>
<p>A recently released experimental evaluation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that Head Start has had little to no effect on cognitive, socio-emotional, health, and parenting outcomes of participating children.</p>
<p>National standards in education work to some degree in countries, whose governmental structure is unitary, as opposed to federal.
They are used to having the national government decree from the top down. In a country as large and as heterogenous as this one, I don’t think national standards will ever work beyond increasing the number of educrats not achieving any real results.
I have experience or exposure to a wide variety of schooling systems from several Western European countires and in public and private schools in the U.S., international schools, schools in India, Department of Defense schools, and homeschooling.</p>
<p>broetchen, I do worry about expectations of results, but not for the reasons you name, more for the reasons of an increasingly multi-lingual society. I think curriculum decisions can be differentiated by state, but the cultural diversity is actually a major headache, and obviously significantly different in the U.S. than in many other countries with in-place national standards.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, one of the major stumbling blocks to reform is the education establishment’s preference (especially in certain regions) for cultural recognition/accommodation over educational accomplishment. It has held back some huge regions when it comes to making progress.</p>
<p>I would be highly, highly skeptical of any story promoted by the Heritage Foundation. Like any ideologically driven think tank, it exists to take the facts and then spin them to fit a very particular narrative, and then re-package them as truth. Sorry, I don’t buy it if it comes from them.</p>
<p>Recently, this is has been the trend in Western European cities with increasingly multicultural populations. Then there is great consternation that their formely excellent academic results are massively slipping – national standards notwithstanding.</p>
<p>I’ve seen similar Head Start data from other sources you might deem much more reliable. Usually it is accompanied with analysis that concludes that the quality of the Head Start staff appears to have the greatest influence on outcomes for the kids, and unfortunately Head Start staff members in general are not of high quality. (Head Start has in many times and places been almost as much as a jobs program as an early childhood ed program.) While there are exemplary Head Start programs, they are unfortunately a very rare exception and not at all the norm.</p>
<p>Some other studies suggest that grouping children together who have a poverty of language (# of words they know (from hearing) and use) in preschool does little to catch up those students in language development with their word-rich peers by the time the students reach second (or perhaps it was third) grade. I heard about from an education researcher from Johns Hopkins who spoke at a conference, and Johns Hopkins isn’t a school known for being a bed of radical conservatism.</p>
<p>These standards are rather trivial in absolute terms. In my state there is a graduation test taken at various times throughout the year. The questions are remarkably easy. The results are remarkably poor.</p>
<p>With national standards at least everyone has a common point to argue from.</p>
<p>I am all for national standards, especially in math and sciences. But how do we decide if these standards are met?</p>
<p>Are we really ready for a national standard test based on these standards? I am very skeptical, with all the political debates on the efficacy and validity of SAT tests over the years.</p>
<p>Many countries with national standards also have national college entrance exams to determine the qualification of prospective students. And in these countries, a score of 61 is not considered to be equivalent to a score of 95 on the same test.</p>