You've seen that teacher (perhaps you are one) or that school (perhaps you are in one - I was in one for my student teaching placement) ... the one where the standards are posted in the classroom for everyone to see and they are ticked off during the year like a shopping list to Costco.
There's nothing wrong with standards, per se, but I think we also need to recognize what they are and how they were developed. Standards are political documents created by committees that may or may not have included a sufficient number of educators. Whenever I've worked with a large group of people and had to get multiple people to approve the document (and those people had little experience and/or screwed up priorities), the document we're working on is never quite right. There are a lot of compromises to be made and so a lot of stuff gets left out.
Herein lies the problem I have with standards ... they leave a lot of stuff out. Do we really want our students' educations to be controlled by people who had to negotiate their education without ever having met them. I say that teaching to the standards is not good teaching, because it ignores the most important people in education - the students and the teachers! It is the teacher's job to decide what is the most appropriate goals for individual students. The standards offer an end point, but those of us in education have had students who are nowhere near that end point. What about them? What does success look like for them? Holding them up to the giant check list on the wall will only set them up for failure.
I have no problem with trying to decide what our students should be able to do, but these decisions should be made my teachers, students, parents, and the community the school exists in ... not by bureaucrats, state level administrators, and politicians - people who don't deal with the day-to-day life of education in the classroom. I'm sure all of these standards documents were run past teachers and teachers were consulted, but they were not the sole creators.
Why? Because teachers are not trusted to do their jobs. That's the whole premise behind standards. We are not professional enough and intelligent enough to be able to set appropriate goals for our students.
Like I said, there's nothing wrong with the standards per se. Okay ... wait ... in the NYC standards there are two issues I'd like to deal with. First, is the standard where students need to read 25 books (or book-length material) per year. This is ubsurd. Partly, because many schools and teacher take this to mean that it is 25 books per year regardless of all the other reading a student may do. That amounts to 1 book every 2 weeks during the calendar year. That's CALENDAR year, not school year. If it was school year, it would be 25 books in about 40 weeks. Ridiculous. But, some schools (including the one where I student taught) has a checklist for the students and by June, they better have read 25 books ... that doesn't mean they've read them well, enjoyed them, or read books that were anywhere near the appropriate level. If we take the standard to include text book reading and other types of reading during the year, how exactly do you guage how much of a text book is a book? Vagueness. This is at the heart of standards.
The other problem I have with the NYC Standards is that it focuses on forms of writing, instead of writing skills. Sure, deep down in those standards about which forms of writing students would be able to do, the standards address the deeper writing skills. But, still many schools implement the standards by just checking off that students have completed the required writing assignments, instead of learning the appropriate skills.
Well, some might say, this is not the problem with standards, it is the problem of the schools implementing the standards. Okay, I might say, you have a point. But, when standards are vague and inappropriately written, the writer needs to take some responsibility. If standards were created locally - by district, or even better school, or even more better by classrooms with teachers and students and parents collaborating - there would be no confusion. Everyone would know what they mean.
Standards set out on the right path, but what they wind up creating is mindless teaching ... teaching by checking off the standards as one goes. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy ... teachers can't teach and don't know what they are doing, so we create standards to guide them, so teacher mindlessly follow the simple path created for them.
My point here is that I want teachers to start trusting themselves again. For little Johnny in the back row who is never going to read 25 books in a year, let's consider success three books. Let's write less essays per year and really work on revision, instead of racing through every essay on the list just so we get them done. Don't look to a list of standards created by someone who has never set foot into your classroom before you look at the students sitting in front of you. Don't ignore the standards completely; use them as a guide, but trust your professional sense. Do what's right for your students before you do what's write for the politicians.
One of the things that bothered me most about my education courses at university was the overemphasis on the standards. The standards were not always treated as the guide they should be, but they were instead presented more as the end-all, be-all of lesson planning. My peers treated their copies of the standards as if they were the bible of education.
In fact, it appeared to me that it was more important to make sure that your lesson plans followed a certain outline, including the standards right at the top, than it was to have lesson plans that would realistically engage students. (Half the lesson plans I wrote during my courses are ones that I would never actually use in the classroom due to some impracticality in the lesson.) We were told that because of the WASL and other testing fads, we would be required to produce evidence to administrators that each lesson met the standards. I guess nothing was more concrete than just plunking the standards in a lesson plan. It would be easier for us to deal with the hassle, as one instructor put it, if we learned right from the start how to provide that evidence up front in our lesson plans. The suggestion was made, too, to put them up in our classroom to show how dedicated we were to following state standards.
What many of us found, though, was that you could apply practically any standard to most lessons, regardless of the subject, due to the broad nature of the standards' language. It sickens me to think that we spent so much time learning about that rather than how to actually manage our future classrooms or learn about the greater issues of modern public school education.
Posted by: MellowOut | July 26, 2006 at 02:10 PM
I didn't agree with you (much) over the important-books issue, but on this one I am with you all the way--and classroom teachers are not the only people guilty of (or stuck with) trying to teach to the standards (or get everything in the book done). Some homeschoolers are stuck (because of homeschool laws) trying to follow state or provincial guidelines which don't apply to their children; others feel (maybe because they're not confident about their own judgment) that they have to do every exercise in the workbook (and that their job's done when the book is).
There's a lot for all of us to learn in this area. I'll link to your post.
Posted by: Mama Squirrel | July 26, 2006 at 02:50 PM
I am a first year Teaching Fellow working for a Brooklyn school starting this September and I've had the standards shoved down my throat at every turn. I've been told to post them in my room, and live by them like a bible. My problem with it is that it makes teachers lazy! Where are the teachable moments if you have an obvious agenda? Sure, you may have a classroom that can crank out work...but what are the students actually learning?
Posted by: Ms. C. | August 03, 2006 at 02:41 PM