![]() ![]() The document did not mention whole language reading instruction, but true believers in that approach put their stamp on the state’s policies during implementation. Bill Honig, California’s state superintendent of public instruction in the 1980s, oversaw the crafting of the state’s 1987 English language arts framework (that era’s term for standards). Each transition allows reinterpretation to fit educators’ beliefs about how reading and math should be taught. Standards must pass through many organizational layers-from state to district to school to classroom-before coming in contact with students. Standards as Written, Standards as ImplementedĪnother flaw in the theory is that no one knows what standards as written will look like when they are ultimately implemented. As reported in “ Inequality at the Starting Gate,” test scores of students in the top and bottom SES quintiles differed by 1.24 standard deviations in math and 1.17 standard deviations in reading. The gaps associated with family socioeconomic status (SES) were enormous. The federal government’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a massive study that began with kindergartners in 1998-99 and followed them through eighth grade, found a comparable span of achievement among kids just starting school. Previous years’ slack standards or inept teaching cannot affect the learning of youngsters entering school for the first time. ![]() Data from NWEA assessments show that the reading abilities of students entering kindergarten cover about a five-year span, from that of a typical three-year-old to that of a typical eight-year-old (based on the 90th-10th percentile gap). Low standards do not create such disparities. They not only failed to learn algebra and fell further behind their peers, but many subsequently took a series of advanced math courses that doomed their high school math careers to repeated failure. The “algebra for all” policies of the 1990s and early 2000s placed many unprepared eighth graders in Algebra I courses. Studies of interventions that simply ratchet up expectations without regard for students’ prior knowledge have yielded disappointing results. One of the most highly replicated findings of education research is that a good predictor of how much students will learn tomorrow is how much they know today. Simply having higher expectations is not enough to drive systemic improvement downstream. An assumption of Common Core advocates is that variation in learning occurs primarily because of schools and classrooms possessing disparate, and all too often, indefensibly low standards-that if schools were brought under a common regime of high expectations, children who are falling behind would catch up or never fall behind in the first place. The illusion of a coherent, well-coordinated system is gained at the expense of teachers’ flexibility in tailoring instruction to serve their students. One key reason is that coordinating key aspects of education at the top of the system hamstrings discretion at the bottom. They are key to the production of learning in classrooms.ĭespite the theory’s intuitive appeal, standards-based reform does not work very well in reality. The book focuses on curriculum and instruction, the what and the how of learning. The other components, all of which are bolted to the academic standards, grow in importance downstream and are often under the control of practitioners. The approach is inherently top-down and regulatory, with standards developed by policy elites and content experts at the top of the system. By promoting a common set of outcomes, standards-based reformers argue, the fragmentation and incoherence plaguing previous reform efforts could be avoided. The theory of standards-based reform rests on the belief that ambitious standards in academic subjects should be written first, guiding the later development of other key components of education-curriculum, instruction, assessment, and accountability. For three decades, standards-based reform has ruled as the policy of choice for education reformers. While the book is specifically about Common Core, the failure of that bold initiative can only be understood in the context of standards-based reform, of which Common Core is the latest and most famous example. ![]()
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