A standards-based revolution

[proud2BlibKansan]

http://saving17000kids.kansascity.com/articles/remaking-schools/

[earthside]

1. A standards-based failure

Here is what Kansas City has to look forward to -- decline.

A 'race to the bottom' is what they will receive, just like the poor kids in Colorado.

(I love the dismissive attitude of the superintendent ... a predicted "implementation dip". That's like saying that I predicted my own failure so it's okay, right? Sorry kids.)

Colorado school districts a study in reform - Denver Post - August 17, 2010

... Westminster 50, which started its reform last year, saw scores drop in seven of eight grades in reading and math, plummeting up to 12 percentage points in seventh-grade math.

"It is exactly what we predicted would happen," said Westminster Superintendent Roberta Selleck. "It is the infamous 'implementation dip.' It will take us three years, maybe four or five."

Westminster, also known as Adams 50, began its "standards-based" reform last year, the most radical portion of which placed elementary and middle-school students in classrooms based on their achievement levels, rather than ages.

Westminster CSAP declines were logged in nearly every grade, subject and school. Overall, reading scores fell nearly 4 percentage points to 40.2 percent proficiency. Sixteen of 18 schools saw their scores fall.

In math, only 27 percent of students were proficient, overall — a 3 point drop from 2009. Fifteen of 18 schools showed declines. ...

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. Scores always drop when you bring in new programs

And they then drop the new programs. I don't think we know if this will work or not. But I'll bet it doesn't last.

[earthside]

3. Five years?

Indeed.

The superintendent is giving herself up to half a decade for scores to turn around ... most parents (let alone the politicians) won't tolerate that kind of time line.

And, now that Colorado has lost out on millions and millions of 'Race to the Top' dollars that would have been used to implement and evaluate this 'revolution' is already doomed.

[Jakes Progress]

4. Superintendents game the system.

We had one who ruined the whole district but had the full support of the board. His trick was to redo everything every two years. If the scores went down, he could say that he was on top of it and had made adjustments accordingly. If they went up, he could say his new program was paying off sooner than he thought. He just re-organized and shuffled everything constantly. His was a moving target so that nothing could be lain at his feet. No program was ever safe, no training was ever completed. Chaos was the order. But he kept his high six figure income.

[southerncrone]

12. We were one of the first RTTT states.

Race To The Trough

They expect our state scores to go from 47th to 1st in the nation overnight. Ha Ha

All we've seen is a quadrupling of paperwork, stress on teachers, more disorganization & kids getting less productivity from teachers as a result. Our secretarial duties severely interfere w/our teaching kids.
The only thing I've seen the $ spent on is a "Virtual High School" for kids who want to graduate early & "academic coaches" who come into teacher's classes & critique them on ridiculous minutia.
TRUE STORY--The head of our Math dept. who has taught for over 35 yrs. was "written up" because she looked to the left of the classroom too much. She had no opportunity for rebuttal, if she had she would have written that there was a group of boys whom she felt were not paying enough attention, so she was keeping an eye on them. She had called them down earlier before the "academic coach" came into the room.


Now the state is back-pedaling w/the same garbage about "expected dips".
We had a faculty meeting about how to explain to parents & community why a kid who was Advanced on their EOC last yr in a subject was now Basic, or Below Basic, this yr.
They are basically admitting that we had such low expectations before that these "old" assessments were invalid.
My question: What about the kids who are "dipping"? What kind of psychological effect will this have on their self-esteem to go from Advanced to Basic in the blink of an eye.

Please tell me how this is helping our kids improve their academic or life skills.
Good money after bad.

This standards based curriculum makes much more sense. I hope that Denver & KC can work out the kinks for the rest of us. But like anything else, it takes NEEDS-ANALYSIS,PLANNING & ATTENTION to the needs of the kids & teachers to make it work well.

[Name removed]

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[txlibdem]

5. The students are happy, the teachers are happy.

I see this style of learning taking off in a big way. When students have the freedom to choose which subjects to work on and learn at their own pace it puts them in the drivers seat. The students are involved in their own learning and taking an active part in making sure they understand the material. The teachers don't want to go back to the old way, either. This is going to be the norm within a decade.

[LWolf]

6. What this article is describing is more "mastery learning" than

"standards-based education." An old system re-labeled. Mastery learning was a proven failure in the 1980s.

[txlibdem]

8. Re-labeling an old system

That's an interesting point but you provide no specifics to back it up. Why was it a proven failure? Who was in control of the ed dept. budgets and policies in the 1980s? Why, it was Ronny Raygun, that champion of teachers unions and America's students :sarcasm:

So your objection is that Ronny Raygun wouldn't like it?

[LWolf]

9. My objection to what?

To mastery-based education, or standards-based education as framed by this article, and the school district in question?

Or both?

Yes, RR was in the WH, beginning his terror campaign about public education and teachers. My objection now is the same as my objection then; it fails, in the long run, to help students succeed.

Mastery-based education? It was a proven failure at the pilot school I worked at: a school formed specifically to pilot mastery-based education. We were in contact with a whole network of schools rolling out this particular "new" way of doing things.

Our results, which were similar to those other schools across the nation:

Students who were already doing well did well. Students who were in the "average" range fell back a little. It took them longer to "master" concepts, so each year, there were some they never got to at all, piling up even more things to master the following year. Students who struggled for any reason lost ground rapidly, for the same reason. It was the time factor.

The school year is the school year. Nobody paid to add days or lengthen days. In any school year, time is finite. If students can't move on to something new until the first concept, or skill, or "STANDARD" is mastered, then some will move rapidly, some will move more sedately, and some will crawl. It's a fact that not every person learns at the same rate.

Those who took longer to "master" skills and concepts ended up never getting to some at all. The American curriculum is extremely broad. It's gotten broader in the decades since. Robert Marzano has pointed out that we would need 22 years to adequately teach all the standards on the books that we are supposed to "cover" in 13. Time is a huge factor that nobody wants to address, because more time costs more money. And even then, it is still finite.

What we learned from the failed 80s experiment is that students progress better overall by moving forward; that they should revisit skills and concepts frequently, and that those who didn't get them the first time have a chance to pick them up on subsequent reviews, without calling a halt to everything else while they "master" one area they are struggling in.

One of the things we are doing with "proficiency-based" learning is trying to address the time issue. The problem is, of course, that we can't create more time. So we use the time we've got differently. That means that those students who are not meeting a benchmark for a standard get extra time while everyone else moves on. They get extra help. They might spend 2-3 blocks of time on that benchmark every day, instead of the one block everyone else is getting.

Where does the time come from? From subjects that aren't subject to high-stakes testing. Social studies is the favorite; so are all elective and enrichment activities: art, music, etc..

Which means that students are missing out, not just on the standards others have already demonstrated proficiency in, but other content they are supposed to learn.

In case you are worried about it, all that extra time is not spent doing the same things that already didn't work; students are able to demonstrate mastery, or proficiency, in a wide variety of formats that allows them to play to their strengths. They get a great deal of support to go along with the extra time, which IS costing; we have extra staff to work with them during that extra time. My district calls them "literacy coaches" and "math coaches."

It's a sincere effort to give them everything they need to succeed. Without lengthening the school day, the school year, or providing summer school, though, it's going to fail many. Many WILL eventually "master" the concept, skill, or standard they are working on. They will, though, in the process, have fallen behind their peers in other areas.

[txlibdem]

10. You are describing the current rigid grade structure of today

Where the students gain the knowledge and skills that they can during the 180 day school year and whatever is missed or glossed over during the school year, the students are denied access to, they "never get to" those subject areas. The same thing happens with "traditional" school districts, sometimes a teacher needs to take extra time with one subject area and some other subject has to lose some of its allotted time to make up for it.

I'd like to see them do away with grade levels, separate the achievement of milestones from the K-12 structure. What a child does not get at age 9 will be waiting for them at age 10. They are not losing ground with anyone because they are not locked into another child's schedule. I also think the American school year is far too short, the 3 month break in the summer is a holdover from agrarian times when the children were needed to help in the harvest. It has no purpose in the modern world but we still have it because "that's the way it's always been" is my guess.

From re-reading the article about the Denver and Kansas City schools I am not sure if they have made that change or not. I see your point about students missing out on art and social studies when the "important" milestones take them too long. Hopefully, they have taken that into account.

[LWolf]

11. I've had the opportunity to work

in a few modified systems during my career, and I would fully support efforts to move away from conventional "grade levels."

I can guarantee that's not happening here. Here's why:

The entire standards and accountability movement that has given us reams of content standards in every state, and high-stakes testing to test those standards, and the use of those high-stakes tests to punish districts, schools, and teachers is founded on grade level standards. On a set of standards to be met at every grade level in order to "pass." We are more rigidly locked into grade levels now than at any time in our history.

I taught in a multi-age school for 5 years in the early 90s. Every student still had a grade; grade levels are written into state laws. If you want to do away with grade levels, you've got to start at the top.

In this school, while all students had a grade, the grades weren't grouped homogeneously. For example, over the 5 years, I had classes of K-4th graders. We didn't teach like a "combination class," teaching the grades in the class separately; we taught some things whole class, and some things in groups based on need. We also moved students around to other classrooms for parts of the day as necessary. Students did not receive letter grades for achievement; instead, every student had an individual learning plan that tracked strengths and goals; we met with every family a minimum of five times a year to create, review, and update that plan.

All of that went away when CA implemented STAR (Standardized Testing And Reporting) which forced us back into grade levels.

Extending the school year and school day costs $$$$. In an era of rapidly shrinking budgets, it's not on the table. Moving to a more flexible calendar, to more individualized and less standardized education will take a profound shift in philosophy on the part of those deciding what "reform" looks like. Up to this point, "reform" has meant "fix it without the support or resources to change the structure of the system." "Do more with less." When teachers say we've been set up to fail, this is part of what we are talking about. "Standards-based" means standardization: uniformity, not flexibility.

That's why I'm saying that this sounds like a re-labeling of the old; it's an old idea, with the same pros and cons, but we haven't evolved a better system to apply it in. We're just giving it a fresh name.

[LWolf]

7. This sounds like using "standards-based education"

to recycle "mastery learning." An 80s failure.

Structuring your instruction, evaluations, and reporting systems around standards isn't new, but it's taking off. We've been calling it a "proficiency based" system.

Still kind of like mastery learning. Grade levels are still grade levels; students demonstrate "proficiency" on state standards in a variety of formats. If a student can't demonstrate proficiency, they keep repeating that standard until they do. If they don't, at the high school level, their electives are replaced with tutoring and study hall, and they attend summer school.

It's a predictable outcome of the standards and accountability movement, and of the perpetual recycling of old ideas in new terms.