The following is a geek discussion on a certain part of public education. Much of the discussion I encounter in the media about improving public education feels out of touch with the learning that is supposed to be the purpose of public education. “Standards-based” and “alignment,” often given foundational status in these discussions, are good examples of this mistake.
“Standards” refers to a matrix of certain concepts organized through the grade levels to assure that students, upon graduation, have mastered a coherent body of knowledge. On first appearance, this seems to make sense and I don’t object to standards by themselves. So it is also with the second term. “Alignment” means that if there are certain facts and concepts we want the next generation to know, then we should make sure that the teachers have classroom materials to assist teaching those ideas and testing material to assess a student’s progress towards mastery of these concepts.
These concepts make sense in theory but in the real world of bureaucracy and money flow, they become problematic. The process of “alignment” begins when the state department of education drafts standards for a specific subject such as mathematics from kindergarten through high school. Then there is another step that gets less attention in the public eye. States create a “framework.” This lists all the attributes a math textbook at each grade level must have in order for that publisher’s textbook to be approved. Without this approval, public textbook money can’t be used to buy that particular text.
This link between standards (guidelines for the teaching) and frameworks (guidelines for the textbook industry) creates the first problem. Standards should drive the framework but the requirements of the textbook publishers influence the standards. A textbook covers a certain topic in a minimal way – some explanatory text, some illustrations, some review material, some suggestions for further study. Any teacher passionate about that particular topic can easily expand the learning from a 45 minutes textbook lesson into a two-week immersion. However, a textbook must be based on the assumption that a teacher won’t do this extra work and will depend completely on the textbook. This means that the textbook must contain enough material for around 170 forty-five minute lessons. So the textbook industry looks for guidance from the states via the frameworks as to what should be covered in all those lessons. And that, in turn, puts pressure on the drafting of standards to put in enough of them to enable frameworks specific enough for textbooks to generate that many lessons.
This process creates so many standards that now those teachers who used to embellish certain areas of their curriculum don’t have time to because they have to “cover the standards.” The pacing of a textbook subtly becomes imposed as the pace for the classroom. When the number of standards gets inflated, teachers lose the freedom to go deep. Classrooms get locked into a textbook approach because that is the fastest way to get through the material. Ironically, to help these teachers out, the upper levels of the educational hierarchy have come up with a list of the standards in which the standards that have the most test questions are in bold. Realistically, justthose standards should be the requiredones and the rest should be presented as suggested supplemental material for textbooks. This would give teachers breathing room.
Two consequences flow from too many standards. When you realize that the same surge of standards is happening in all subjects, overwhelmed teachers respond in at least two ways. Because standards begin “fourth graders shall learn…,” the consequence can quickly turn into lock-step, whole-class instruction. In sequential subjects like math, this approach can leave the slower student behind and bore the faster student. The more young people I have the privilege to teach, the more profound becomes the absurdity of assuming that “all fourth graders shall…” The uniqueness of each child is one of the most precious and fundamental aspects of humanity and it must be honored.
Alysia adds: “Nature dictates that we all grow at different rates and learn in different ways. This is the natural way human beings are. A massive tragedy is occurring for the students on the backside of the developmental curve. The material is coming at them too early and so fast that they can not assimilate it. Then they move up to the next grade and get new material based on the material from the last year that they did not understand. This goes on up the grades until you get students in the upper grades that have a big pile of nothing. I get 6th grade transfer students who are so confused about all the procedures they tried to memorize that they are functionally illiterate in basic mathematics. If I make the choice (which I do) to go back and reteach them the concepts they don’t understand, it will assure that they won’t get the sixth grade standards this year and will do poorly on the test. So I am forced to choose between what is best for a child’s future success in math or trying to cram the sixth grade standards in to make our test scores higher. This is painful for all concerned.”
The second consequence is that overwhelmed teachers fall back to “scripted” teaching. Textbooks are organized so that a teacher can “cover” the material with very little preparation or thought. The lessons are all laid out with teaching material and a script with which the teacher talks the class through the lesson.
Paranoid as it may sound, I fear this is the direction in which a variety of forces, consciously or not, are moving public education. More of the public education funding would flow to textbook publishers. Teachers would become non-unionized, low-paid drudges who read scripts. Public schools would become the holding pens for all those who can’t afford private education. These public schools would, for thirteen years, mold children with boring, scripted work where the child has no influence on what he or she will learn and is mostly learning to do drudge work in compliance to authority. I say “holding pens” because as I’ve written many times in Cairns, I believe one of the ingredients most essential to education/learning is responsiveness. Learning thrives when the world (which includes the teacher) responds to the thoughts and actions of the learner. From this perspective, scripted teaching borders on a nightmarish joke.
We move even closer to this joke when “alignment” brings in standardized testing. As I assume you know, public education is under the gun to produce high standardized test scores. As the saying goes, “what you measure is what you get, so be careful what you measure.” As one teacher lamented to us, her students now read only “selections” (rather than stories) because in hour-long, standardized reading tests, students only have time to read “selections” (a couple of paragraphs) and then answer multiple-choice questions. Therefore, all through their schooling, they are preparing for the test by reading only selections rather than stories long enough to spin spells, communicate wisdom, and nourish the love of books. What are we doing to our children when we condemn them to hours of reading selections that carry no magic, only opportunities for multiple-choice questions to be asked of them?
This topic grows weirder when we understand the relationship between textbooks and standardized tests. Because of the emphasis on test scores, textbooks and teaching materials are evaluated on whether they can improve test scores. This creates a strange feedback loop in which the nature of the tests shapes the teaching material. Realize that most of the standardized test items are a one to three sentence question followed by four possible short answers. A textbook series that raises test scores will be one that presents the material in a way transferable to test-taking.
Many years ago, back when we were crammed together in small rooms, I had a very strange experience. In California, only eighth graders take a standardized social studies test that covers the sixth through eighth grade history standards. I was supervising this test in a small room while the sixth and seventh graders were in their history class in the next room. Their teacher was showing a video she had checked out on world religions (which are part of the sixth and seventh grade standards). The eighth graders gave no indication of awareness of the video playing in the other room so focused were they on working on the test. But I could hear it faintly in the background and I was amazed at how the narrator in the video was saying almost the exact wording of one fourth of the questions on this history test. Now that is one example of alignment. It makes me wonder how many times in three years the students will hear the same sentences incanted. Instead of tests being aligned to the teaching, the presentation of material is being aligned to the specific questions on the tests. The classroom is taking on the format of a multiple-choice test. The standards are filled with verbiage about how the students will understand, draw conclusions, make connections but what’s being measured is selecting one answer of four to a question that can be answered in a short phrase.
So when you hear or read discussions about standards and alignment, take it all with a healthy handful of salt. The reality is different than the rhetoric. The magic lies in the unique response of unique individuals grappling together with deep, important ideas.
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