The False Premise of National Education Standards
The education world is abuzz with the release Wednesday of draft curriculum guidelines by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. CCSSI’s draft is closely watched because the Obama administration plans to withhold billions in federal funding from states that refuse to adopt it, or something very similar.
The whole idea of imposing a single set of age-based standards on all students rests on a false premise: that children are identical widgets capable of being dragged along an instructional conveyor belt at the same pace, benefiting equally from the experience.
But kids are different — not only from one another, but when it comes to their own varying facility across subjects as well. Any single set of age-based standards, no matter how thoughtfully conceived, will necessarily be too slow or too fast for most children.
Consider a concrete example. The new CCSSI math standards place trigonometric functions (sine, cosine, etc.) well into the high school curriculum. Students would be taught this material in their mid teens. What good would that do for someone like Dick, who wrote this:
[W]hen I was eleven or twelve, I had read a book on trigonometry that I had checked out from the library. … A few years later, when we studied trigonometry in school, I still had my notes and I saw that my [theorem proofs] were often different from those in the book. Sometimes, for a thing where I didn’t notice a simple way to do it, I went all over the place till I got it. Other times, my way was most clever — the standard demonstration in the book was much more complicated! So sometimes I had ‘em beat, and sometimes it was the other way around.
Dick — Richard P. Feynmann — told many other entertaining stories in his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynmann … like the time he asked a Time magazine reporter if he could refuse the Nobel Prize in Physics (“no”).
How does teaching (or re-teaching) trigonometry to all children at the same age help math whizzes like Feynmann? How does it help kids who find mathematics rough going, and lag behind their peers no matter how much support they receive from parents and teachers? The answer is obvious: it doesn’t.
But, that children all learn at different rates is racist! All children must beb equally stupid (and remain so as adults) for social justice! All hail Dewey, Marx and Bill Ayers!
Disparate impact will prevent this most sensible of all educational changes from ever taking place. The advanced (for their age) classes will not include enough black and hispanic to satisfy the bean counting race hustlers and will be deemed racist. Same for the dearth of whites in the lowest skill classes.
America is tied to this implicit racism and its associated loss of productive capacity until we stop counting people by race.
Hey, get off their case. The Fed. Dept. of Ed. is very busy right now. They are busy spending stimulus money on weaponry. Thanks Drudge:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=cb68cf9f3fa2fe18a83d1c3dee0039b2&tab=core&_cview=0
It’s not supposed to help the whiz kids, OK? It’s supposed to hold them back – see Harrison Bergeron.
We need to get government (and especially the feds) out of the education business ASAP.
The truth is that neither age-based standards nor performance-based grouping is on Barrack Hussein Obama’s radar.
Simply put he is content to reason within himself that America, White people and Jews have suppressed blacks for so long that they will never be able to pull even with the rest of the human race. Therefore, blacks have the right to be given everything they want.
Which method reconciles with this kind of thinking best? Age-based standards or performance-based grouping?
You will never see anything remotely like intelligence (water) seeks its own level teaching in American public schools. What you will see is our country moving closer and closer to the doctrines preached by Islamic Muslims and Black Liberation Theology. Simply put black power revenge trumps everything because “America’s chickens came home to roost.” Thanks to the intellectually swifter than a bullet going through whipped cream voters, their coop just happens to be the White House.
I’m a product of a mix of both systems, of strict age-groupism, and also of strict academic performance tracking. Also of two more modalities Andrew Coulson did not mention, and I would say that there is at least one more I haven’t experienced, but have read about and have seen.
Except for Kindergarten and the first day of first grade I HATED age-groupism it guaranteed that by third grade I was totally bored, lazy and only adept at ‘getting over’ my teachers. Why? Because I was super fast in learning — match, reading, and writing. I would have EVERY math assignment done before the teacher returned to her desk, in reading I was a speed reader from three years old — insisting that I be able to read ‘out loud’ was hobbling, I can not approach being able to speak that fast. The ONLY thing that reading aloud to a group did was frustrate me and make me mockery to the class, because even at for me super slow reading speed I was rushing through spoken words, and was constantly rebuked by the teacher for ‘going too fast’. How many times have I heard that! Should school be the place where you learn to go slow?
Are they teaching reading or ‘reading aloud to an audience’? At that elementary level it is the former — they are teaching how to read.
But in fourth grade magic happened. Some educational genius and bold person in my district decided to put me on a new experimental self-paced program. That’s one of the other modalities. That was a mathematics program and in two months I mastered set theory and proofs. I was so happy! But also in two months I had completed the entire program — it ended abruptly, there was simply no more of the program to be had. My teachers said I had done great, but then it was back to doing banality and slow banality, of being bored, of developing bad habits to fill the time.
After many and continual fights and torments in the public junior high seventh my parents sent me to a tracked Catholic High School — that was rigorously tracked academically, and they had at that time a strict entrance exam. I was placed in the first track. For two years I did academically extremely well. Still, it was EASY. And I was unused to the discipline, the uniforms, and began campaigns ‘against the powers that be’. I left the school at the start of eleventh, on a day where I decided the required tie and jacket were too much to bear. I returned to the chaos and rigorous enforcement of mediocracy.
I was in a major accident, with internal injuries, and had to convalesce at home for six months. That was another MAGIC educational experience — the district provided an at-home tutor, and I was allowed to go at my own pace, under one-on-one tutoring.
But that ended and I returned to the chaos and mediocracy of a weakly-tracked public school.
Placing students of equal abilities is akin to tracking, it singles out those that are successful from those that aren’t. This is damaging to the self-esteem of those placed in the “struggling” group. We can’t have that, so all classes MUST be taught at the level of the lowest performers to ensure their self-esteem isn’t damaged. Also, for absolutely no reason will a student be seperated from their peer group, as that would also cause a decrease in self-esteem, so just pass them along to the next grade, even less prepared for it then they were the last.
Which explains why so many entry-level college students are required to take “make-up” classes to get them brought up to college level skills.
Speaking as a classroom teacher, I would definitely NOT say that age-based grouping makes things easier for me. In point of fact, it makes my life extremely difficult. 95% of the dicipline problems we run into involve kids who are either not ready for the material we are trying to teach, or so far past it they are bored to tears. The “good” kids figure this out and go through the bureaucratic motions to get their tickets punched; the “bad” kids are the ones who don’t go along and rebel.
The problem is racial inequality is one reason we’re stuck with the losing paradigm, but not the only reason. The bigger one is that we expect public schools to do two jobs: educate and babysit. If we seriously let students learn at their own pace, some would finish more quickly than others. We can’t allow that to happen because then they would be unsupervised and presumably get into trouble. So instead we have an elaborate program of busywork to keep young people in the classroom (and out of the labor pool) for the full 7 hour day and 12-year program. If we abandoned the babysitting function and told kids that they could work at their own pace and get their diploma as soon as they demonstrated mastery of the curriculum, they would work much harder and progress much faster and we could focus our resources on the ones who really need extra help…
We can’t allow that to happen because then they would be unsupervised and presumably get into trouble. So instead we have an elaborate program of busywork to keep young people in the classroom (and out of the labor pool) for the full 7 hour day and 12-year program.
Setting standards isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but how education is changed to reach those standards can lead to many unintended consequences, like “teaching to the test.”
I’ve not yet read through the standards, but hope everyone who’s interested does read them. There are some great general criticism here, as well as several innovative ideas.
And then submit your constructive criticism here:
http://feedback.corestandards.org/s-gwid2-233754
This isn’t a realistic criticism. As one of the commenters noted, schools are incapable of not advancing people who don’t meet standards. So that idea is a non-starter.
Standards are needed and are important. We need to hold our schools accountable. We get people in college (I teach there) that can’t read, write effectively, or do simple calculations, much less understand how to do real world math problems.
I agree that it would be a mistake to specify what every third grade class in the country must teach. However, it would be a mistake NOT to set forth standards that must be met to pass say the eighth grade. High school graduates are a travesty.
We have a responsibility to our children that we will give them the skills they need to be successful. We are failing at that.
Since 1958, when I was ten years old, it seems to me that the more the government tries to fix what’s wrong with “education,” the more that goes wrong with it.
Bill – an honest question:
How are these kids admitted to the college where you teach? Aren’t there tests in place to weed out such students? Doesn’t allowing these students to be promoted to college just reinforce the flawed k-12 advancement model?
As homeschoolers, the children are dismayed at always having to answer the ubiquitous question of “What grade are you in?”
We are not a “school at home” family — we educate instead. It is a profound difference and makes the “grade level” question irrelevant.
In many cases we don’t even use a graded book. We go to an authoritative book and we stay there until we have mastered a subject. (You will find this was the norm in the 19th century.) There is often uneven development between subjects depending upon the child’s unique talents and gifts, so even if it were possible to assess an objective grade level in a subject area, it is often way different for other subjects.
I wish all children could experience this liberation. It saddens me to think of all that lost potential. Under our current system, the struggling ones are made to feel inferior because they aren’t at “grade level” while prideful attitudes are being fostered in the so-called “gifted” ones by being made to think they are somehow superior to all others. This is so destructive. All children should be encouraged to do their best, whatever level that is, and not be made to feel inferior or superior while doing so.
There is also much more to being a well-rounded person than academics and sports despite our society’s obsession with these things. What about a man’s heart and character?
I wrote:
“All children should be encouraged to do their best, whatever level that is, and not be made to feel inferior or superior while doing so.”
That is not to say we don’t encourage competition or that children should not feel good about their accomplishments. But the *process of education itself* should be encouraging so that all students will desire to press on and become the best they can be.
Just wanted to clarify that!
Thank you, Bill. I don’t see any statement that indicates that all students of the same age would be taught the same material at the same time. Only that students’ understanding would be assessed at the same time. This doesn’t do anything to eliminate classes (particularly in secondary schools) that are taught at different levels. Standards can be exceptionally useful to shed light on the impact of purely social promotion– school districts should be ashamed of passing kids who can’t pass pitifully low bars.
The “too black to fail” ideology hasn’t worked out very well (methinks).
Recruit the best teachers for a new enjoyable work environment; thereby hastening the extinction of the US public education system. At this stage, continued funding of the status quo is being knowingly complicit and idiotically proflagate besides.
If increasing the number of successful K-12 students is the objective, then vouchers, charter and homeschooling are the only moral choices. The extant infrastructure can rapidly reform itself and improve enough to stop the student escape, or it won’t.
IIRC, we used to instruct our future citizens in one room school houses, simultaneously serving 6-8 grade levels. No wonder the school marm/master were distinguished members of the community, eh? Uphill both ways, and barefoot too.
If only for security and budgetary reasons, market forces will downsize schools. To where? Overcrowded (again) public classrooms, where all the same problems are exacerbated? Or smaller centers of learning excellence not owned by the State that offer a moneyback guarantee, if your kid behaves? And closeby.
8-48 seats in modules, manned by a superior teaching/mentoring team (present and virtual) and equipped with $50K worth of computer and communications tech can simultaneously serve any subject at any K-12 grade level, at the individual student’s pace. And we’ll fill lots of those millions of empty commercial properties we seem to have sitting around on long term empty.
Most 3rd-12th grade students can be captivated for hours on end and self-motivated to achieve ever-better results; as demonstrated by their mass adoption of gaming. Addiction? It’s about the value/utility of the interactive content and storyline, not the “twitch” reaction time.
Re-direct the funding faster please.
If anybody thinks tracking is hostile to a kid’s self esteem, they should consider the impact of not tracking. How harmful is it to a child’s self esteem if he has to work as hard as he can just to get a C and then watches the student next to him sleep in class and get an A?
Economics molds education. When the country needed scientists, the government found money for college texts to be placed in high school libraries. That was then. Now it is less expensive to import our scientists than to train them. Only the brightest and most self-motivated students acquire an education, I’m afraid. That occurs despite the system, not because of it.
IMHO Bill is right (9:03)as was George Bush, if I am understanding the issues correctly. We need national subject-area tests at different grade levels so parents and interested citizens can see how our schools are doing at their jobs. Parents can make more intelligent choices and their children can get more specific tutoring help. To have such standards does nothing to inhibit the more gifted learner, neither does it shame the slower learner (in the specific subject — there are many different “intelligences”). Everyone can benefit.
The danger is if the federal government requires certain textbooks or methods of teaching. I think we should eliminate most the Department of Education except that aspect that gives these national subject-oriented tests.
Professional teachers all seem to believe in the Mud Theory of education. This theory states that kid’s brains are all made of the same gooey mud that always comes to rest at the same level inside their heads. The theory also states that there is a big empty space inside a kid’s head. It is the job of the teacher to fill up the vacant space with more of that same gooey mud in the form of politically correct ideologies.
I was raised in a high school environment that used streaming by subject – good math students together, bad math students together; good French language students together, bad French language students together; and the same for mediocre students. It worked fine. Some kids were in the top class for math and in the mediocre class for French and so on. there was mobility between the streams. If a student improved at a subject he/she could be moved up to a higher stream and vice versa. The streams were called A, B, and C.
I don’t remember any kids being upset by the streams because kids are pretty sensible about their own abilities. Kids were encouraged strongly by the teachers and were expected to do their best, but there was no pandering to “self esteem” craziness.
Having said all that, unambiguous educational standards are good, but you’re trying to apply them in a culture which can’t face up to standards. Heck, people can’t even control their own food intake. Consequently all the paper standards in the world won’t change a thing. Kids in the US public education system are doomed to have their clocks cleaned by better educated kids from many other countries.
Now that is something to worry about.
All of the above exegesis only goes to explain why the number of charter schools, home schoolers, private schools and private schools started by angry parents is exploding in the US. Having taught HS English, Reading and History over a 30 year term, I quit because I was tired of being forced to dumb down my lesson plans for the All Children Left Behind Law, tired of being told how to teach by people who had no hope of passing my ninth grade English class, tired of being told that teaching my kids how to write 500 word, no-right-answer, persuasive papers on topics they felt important wasn’t nearly so important as making them memorize factoids for the state test.
Many parents are able to go around the intellectual junk food being taught in the public schools. Ever notice the number of minority parents who think vouchers are an excellent idea? What would happen if their kids had a decent shot at education (perhaps “shot” is not the best term here)? How many of them would be graduating on the Dean’s List from Ol’ Miss, even if they weren’t big enough to play in the pro’s? And the big point is, how many government and educational hacks would have to find real work in some other field because giving all kids an equal chance to succeed (not equality of result) would more than prove that quality of education trumps skin pigmentation every time? The wheelgun was the equalizer in the Old West; quality education is the equalizer now.
Ave atque Vale
It’s silly to believe that government schools intend to teach anything more than the bare minimum in terms of the Three R’s. Actually, there is no minimum.
More important subjects by far are self esteem enhancement, sex ed, anti-Western Civilization-ology, and any other kooky notion that allows young minds to atrophy.
Tweaking standards and curriculum won’t change the outcome of government education because the basic mission of the government school administration does not include what normal people call education.
The abundant talk of “national education standards” serves to distract from the scarcity of national education results.
I call for separation of School from State.
This all seems like a microcosm for the big socio-political issues of the day. Do we want equality of opportunity or equality of result? Do we look at children as individuals, each with different needs and abilities, or do we look at them as one homogenous group? Do we allow teaching styles and standards to be decided by individual teachers, schools and districts, or do we let one group of “experts” decide on a uniform policy to be applied by everyone everywhere?
In each case, I would argue the former. It appears that the current administration believes in the latter.
Public schools today reject grouping not on grounds that children are interchangeable widgets.
The reigning dogma today is that all children “learn differently” and, hence, require “differentiated instruction.”
sorry — should have finished my thought
Grouping continues to be rejected on ideological ground going back to the anti-tracking movement of the 1980s.
Also, for absolutely no reason will a student be seperated from their peer group, as that would also cause a decrease in self-esteem
While this is broadly true, inside public schools no one has been talking about self esteem for years — at least, not inside my public school district. We **never** hear the words “self esteem.” This is so true that when a parent I know protested that chronic failure in math was bad for her child’s self esteem, the building principal replied, “Oh, please. We all have low self esteem.”
Public schools have moved on.
It’s all about “character education” now. Character education and collaboration, the ultimate ’21st century skill.’ Students learn to collaborate in mixed-ability groups. That’s the obsession.
Which means parents ferrying their kids all over heck and gone on weekends to make face-to-face collaboration by kids too young to drive a reality.
Thats funny teh articel refers to the jesuits pedegagy. There is an on-line homescoll curriculum that is balls to the walls rigourous. No fluff. And to pass from on level to next required 100% mastery! KIDS LOVE IT. They love challenges and they have the time to do it. No Grade levels, just learn at your own pace. Requires a PITTANCE of cost.. But SO MUCH BETTER.
Public eductaion if like junk food, and all thse diuscussions about cost etc, are simply exchanging expensive junk for expensive junk. This “hamburger” did not work, its too fattening, lets try “pizza” After a few years, this “pizza” lacks nutrients. and on an on.
But for a few bucks, you could have veggies, fruits and real food at home. Or co-op.
http://www.classicalliberalarts.com/
When thse kids graduate they are going to be solid!
@31
Ed,
Turn on spell check.
Education is the whore of politics. All changes come as a result of some election year lobbying from up and coming politicians needing a platform that can be easily understood by the masses. This is why keeping it simple with phrases like “No Child Left Behind” sticks in the minds of the voters. It does not matter that one size does not fit all – it is the notion of universal success that appeals enough to demand change in the system. Look at what has happened to learning over the years. It has gone from focusing on the child, to focusing on a single set of standards that are age appropriate. Despite all the money, all the testing (which of course shows gains because the multiple choice tests are flawed by simplistic choices) and all the furor, our students are falling behind, are not globally competitive, require remedial college courses and politically they get to keep talking about the same thing, just change the names and add a bow. If you want change take the politics out of education. There are plenty of learning models that work – none used by public schools.
Yup, garbage in, garbage out. And the kids, OUR kids suffer. Yet, as a society, with the exception of private and home schoolers, we do nothing about it. The system keeps spewing forth mindless drones (democrats). The ones that dont fit or buck the system go on to become small business owners, but the rest stagnate. We do NOTHING but point at the cesspool and accept it & bemoan the lost exceptionalism brought on by the left. Imagine, in 20 years what a stinking, rotting cesspool healthcare will be!! We will point at the mess and do NOTHING then as we do NOTHING now!
All is lost.
Advancing By Mastery Rather Than Age
Learning presupposes that ideas, concepts and facts are internalized. Internalized assimilation of these data is fundamental for new understanding and learning. Without understanding earlier learnings, more difficult information is harder to learn.
As adults, we learn based upon earlier mastery of information. For instance, corporate education assumes we have the requisite skills and understanding to be successful in a class. No manager would send a person working in the mail room to executive financial management training. No one would question that decision. Outside the work environment that same person from the mail room may be an accomplished black belt. The mail room person could be expected to successfully learn advanced black belt training. Would you expect success for a senior VP in a black belt course with the expectations of mastery of the subject if that VP had no experience in martial arts? Again the obvious answer is no. So why is it so easy to see the sense in learning in the adult population and so difficult to see that same logic for our children?
If students were assessed in a curriculum, and allowed to advance to the next level in each course of the curriculum once they mastered the material, the students would be able to excel in their strengths and work at their own pace on subjects than gave them trouble.
It is a well understood fact that students can be successful in one area of their academics and have trouble in other areas (i.e. may be strong in verbal skills and poor in spatial reasoning).
Teaching by age is the norm because it’s a way to move children smoothly through the system. Smooth that is for the administration. Parents and children are told that big reason to continue age based education is for the socialization of the students. How well socialized is the student that doesn’t learn to read, or the student that develops math anxiety?
In adult education it is not unusual to see a 20-year-old and a 45-year-old learning the same material. Why? Because they are at relatively the same level of understanding of the subject matter at hand regardless of age.
Teaching to mastery rather than age would better utilize resources, better serve the students and better serve society. Achieving mastery at certain milestones, regarding math, writing and reading, would help ensure that students received essential help to accomplish these goals. Once everyone is taught to mastery of a curriculum, rather than passing poorly skilled students to the next grade, our children’s self-esteem would stand a better chance to develop as the success they have in one area would bolster challenges they have in mastering another.
This approach has something for everyone. If assessing our students and teaching at their own speed to foster mastery was the norm, it could solve the problem of kids being labeled slow for poor reading skills while their advanced math skills go unnoticed. For the students with “gifted” skills, the fact they might be several grade levels ahead of their cohort may be more acceptable as more students are in different levels according to their talents. A gifted student may not be a good athlete and play in a younger group that is more attuned their level rather than be humiliated by the talented athletes. The average student would benefit by being the glue that holds this process together. They perform well at many subjects close to their age level. However, they too could benefit from a mastery based outcome and have their strengths shine and get more attention to areas of challenge.
So this approach would truly leave no child behind, recognize different rates of learning based on each student for each subject, foster success at every level and ensure that students leave the K-12 with the skills needed to pursue future endeavors. A student’s passage through the K-12 system may be longer or shorter than the standard 13 years. The mastery of some subjects may be beyond K-12, but none of the core subjects would be deficient.
Quite better INTERNATIONAL education standards…