My two daughters are officially
school age. My younger daughter is
wrapping up her first year of kindergarten while my older daughter is finishing
first grade. Assuming they move through the system as designed and graduate as
expected, one will graduate from high school in 2025 and the other will graduate in 2026. Can we predict
in 2014 the knowledge and skills that will make them ready for the college and careers of 2025 and 2026? Are we willing to
accept legislation that has regulated the learning they will need? The more rooted the legislation, the harder
it is to innovate, and we have a world progressing at warp speed around us
while our schools remain relatively unchanged except for the amount of outside
assessment with little authenticity tied to classroom practice. This article is an attempt to simplify some relationships, clarify definitions, identify conflated definitions and use reason to challenge what we accept about standards-driven reform efforts, specifically standards in application to learning.
Standards are regulatory measures of what should be in the mind of a child and simply do not apply to a learning brain. We have learned a lot of
about learning and the way the brain learns, but we certainly do not know
enough to regulate the content and skills that need to be inside the mind of a
child from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
A standard is an industrial tool for measuring that does not work to
measure learning in the brain. However,
we systemically keep trying to pound the square peg into a round hole. A standard measure is binary, not
complex. Standards takes an issue of
quality, safety, performance and now learning and makes the conclusion black
and white, right or wrong, pass or fail.
Is Johnny proficient? Yes -Johnny is proficiency. No- Johnny is not proficient. The answer to each standard inquiry probe yields
is yes or no, but the binary nature is well hidden in standards-based reporting
trying to make it more complex than a system sorting success and failure.
Standards are about
learning, not about teaching. A
curriculum outlines the content a teacher is expected to cover. Standards are different. Standards are expectations for what, exactly
a student is expected to learn over the course of a grade. On the topic of learning, we have learned a
great deal from cognitive science and neuroscience. "When neuroscience connects to
scientific knowledge about cognition and development, it can be helpful in a
global way, supporting the cognitive developmental knowledge; but it cannot
provide specific guidance on its own. With the excitement of the remarkable
advances in biology and neuroscience in recent decades, people naturally want
to use brain science to inform policy and practice, but our limited knowledge
of the brain places extreme limits on that effort. There can be no
"brain-based education" or "brain-based parenting" at this
early point in the history of neuroscience!" (Fischer, 2014). An accomplished neuroscientist
does not advise policy based on what is known about learning, but the National
Education Goals Panel of the National Governor's Association already regulated
and legislated learning through standards.
The work of this panel brought us the education reform as we know it
today. No Child Left Behind reauthorized the Elementary Secondary Education Act
using standards as the regulatory measure. A curriculum is what a teacher is expected to
teach or cover over the year, and standards are what a student is expected to
learn over the year, to have in place inside of his/her mind. I have lived this subtle distinction and it
has taken me quite a while to simplify and articulate, so I will continue to revisit
the distinction throughout the article. The
No Child Left Behind Act and the call
for standards as a measure, shared by the states is outlined in the Statement
of Purpose. The Statement of Purpose
reads, “The purpose of this title is
to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to
obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on
challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic
assessments. This purpose can be accomplished by (1) ensuring that high-quality
academic assessments, accountability systems, teacher preparation and training,
curriculum, and instructional materials are aligned with challenging State academic standards so
that students, teachers, parents, and administrators can measure progress
against common expectations for student academic achievement;” (No ChildLeft Behind, 2002, p. 15) Standards cannot measure learning for purposes of student achievement using a binary bar of proficiency.
In the Frequently Asked Questions on the Common Core Website, standards
are conflated as goals, “What are educational standards? Educational standards are the learning goals
for what students should know and be able to do at each grade level.
Educational standards help teachers ensure their students have the skills and
knowledge they need to be successful, while also helping parents understand what
is expected of their children,” (Common Core Website,2014). Because the standard definition
has been conflated, between expectations and goals, leaders and those in power
have become confused. Ad hominum drives
much of the education reform debate. The
idea of industrial standards were mistakenly applied to a young learning brain. Learning goals are not
synonymous with standards and certainly do not serve as a definition. In what other industry is a standard a
goal? Education is the only industry
where standards are conflated with goals.
When standards-driven education reform happened during my early years in
the classroom, I accepted the reform as progressive and began working with
standards to solve incompatibilities with my grade book. I did this work before I clearly defined
standards. Arriving at the idea
standards simply do not apply to learning took years of debating,
misunderstanding, understanding and concluding before resolving; standards do
not apply to a learning brain. Standards
are useful industrial measures for regulating blueberries, automotive safety
and professional expectations. Standards
simply do not work to regulate learning in the mind of a child.
Standards are not an outline of what teachers
teach. The guide, from a traditional
sense, is the curriculum. Standards are
the minimal expectations for what a student is expected to learn, by grade
level, from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
You can move the bar higher or lower but the bar remains the minimal
student expectation of what the child is supposed to know and skills the child
is supposed to be able to demonstrate.
The bar, or measuring stick, is the expectation which is the same bar at
the same time for every child and every one of that child’s peers to
demonstrates proficiency and that minimal proficiency is not legislated to
budge as years go by. The standard bar, a binary bar, sorts students. This is the logic dictating standard-based
assessments as regulated by No Child Left Behind. Standards
report as advanced, proficient, partially proficient and unsatisfactory. The advanced and partially proficient, the 4
and the 2, are smoke and mirrors.
Standards are binary, proficient or unsatisfactory.
Steven Denning insightfully defined a root
cause for the problems in public education writing, “To my
mind, the biggest problem is a preoccupation with, and the application of, the factory
model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the
scalability and efficiency of “the system”, to which the students, the
teachers, the parents and the administrators have to adjust” (Denning,2011). Sir Ken Robinson, likewise,
has taken the world by storm with his TED Talk about revolutionizing a system. Ken Robinson speaks of the system as being
industrial in nature and points to the industrial model as the problem. “We
have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a
manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching
people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of
agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical
process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human
development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under
which they will begin to flourish.”(Robinson, K. 2010).
In our midst is a quiet revolution happening
because of Maria Montessori. Well over a decade ago she did work in a small
area with children that revolutionized education with a method instead of a
system. Maria Montessori’s insight
revealed what standards cannot measure, “Children are human beings to whom
respect is due, superior to us by reason of their innocence and of the greater
possibilities of their future,” (Daily MontessoriQuotes, 2014).
|
Traditional System
|
Current System of Reform in the U.S.
|
Montessori
Method
|
Origin
|
Factory-based
|
Industrial
|
Montessori
|
Assessment
|
Curriculum-based grading
|
Standards-driven outcomes
|
The child followed by the teacher
|
Central to the Model
|
Curriculum
Content and skills are expectations of what a teacher
is to deliver.
|
Standards
Skill-based learning expectations with some suggestion
of content
|
The child
Analytical skills of the child are recognized and
honored as capable of understanding of the world around uses senses. Focused materials are available for exploration and discovery.
|
Adult Role
|
Teacher, school or district manages and reports
Teacher is trained in pedagogy and theory as an
undergraduate
|
Government regulates and reports
Teacher is trained in pedagogy and theory as an
undergraduate
|
The child is followed by the teacher who tracks mastery
along the way, by child
One must have a degree before pursuing a Montessori
endorsement. The training includes how follow a child, and how to enable a
reader, how to enable number sense, etc.
|
Transition Time
|
Yearly
|
Yearly
|
Every three years
|
Measures learning according to
|
a teacher, school or district's formula
Formative and Summative Assessment
Grades incorporate all information as determined by the
teacher’s assessments and observations, including effort.
|
minimal expectations
High-Stakes Summative Assessment
Formative assessment used more to predict summative
than to inform instruction
Summative assessments given
yearly for all at each grade with high stakes implications for students,
teachers, schools and districts.
|
mastery
Tracking Assessments (Formative)
The teacher updates tracking sheets daily recording
concept or skill introduction and also the date mastery is observed
|
Reporting and
Record keeping
|
Grade books
reported as grades
A B C D F
|
Reports
of standard achievement
4-advanced
3-proficient
2-partially proficient
1-unsatisfactory
|
Detailed tracking sheets in the hands of the teacher
following the child
|
Summary of learning according to
|
Content delivery assessed by teacher using grades
|
Minimal expectations for college and career ready sorting
students by proficiency
|
Learning goals tracked until mastery
|
As someone who loves philosophy, I avoid absolutes. However, as an educator and mother, I
will say two things absolutely about every child.
1. Every child is able.
2. Every child is exceptional.
Standards do not allow for exceptional. Standards are binary in nature. They sort.
Standards sort with a binary bar.
Students are above or below. The
additional categories, advanced (well beyond the bar) and partially proficient
(approaching the bar) distract from the binary nature and mirror the grading
system but in a standard, completely objective, way. The scoring, an important element, is either
scored by bubbles, right and wrong, or constructed responses. The constructed response may be a few words, a sentence, a paragraph or an essay and is still reduced to the binary bar of proficiency. However, the one with the
measuring stick is, very often, someone who is temporary hired help and not an
educator.
Another very real issue attributed to the binary bar is standards
do not allow for exceptions. The no
exceptions nature of No Child Left Behind, is why there is such a fiasco trying
to come up with another formula to make up for one that did not do the
job. Value Added Measures (VAM) are now calculated to
solve where Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) failed. Meanwhile, standards are
doing the legislated job of measuring and sorting performance into success and failure.
The categories apply to students, teachers, schools, districts,
etc. It is not the success side of the
sort that gets the attention, nor does it bring profit. The failure brings profit. This is true of our traditional system as
well. Short term intervention and fixes
bring the greatest profit. In the case
of Montessori, long term innovation brings worth and economic gain. Steve Denning explained how Montessori was the
beginning for two major innovative companies, Amazon and Google, as their founders
began learning in a Montessori classroom (Denning, 2011). The greatest irony of No Child Left Behind is
we are now leaving behind all those students who we were not worried about
leaving behind.
Learning is anything but binary. Learning is dynamic, complex and
interconnected. Standards are two
dimensional and without shades of gray.
So I challenge the No Child Left Behind legislation and its complex
formulas trying to keep it relevant.
If a standard applies to a learning mind, there are no exceptions.
Every child’s mind is exceptional by nature.
Therefore, standards do not apply universally to learning.
References
Common Core State
Standards (2014). Frequently asked questions. What are standards?
Denning, S. (2011). Is
Montessori the origin of Google and Amazon? Forbes Magazine.
Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/08/02/is-montessori-the-origin-of-google-amazon/
Denning, S. (2011) The
single best idea for reforming k-12 education. Forbes Magazine.
Montessori, M. (2014).
Montessori quotes. Daily Montessori. Retrieved from
No Child Left Behind
(2002). PUBLIC LAW 107–110—JAN. 8, 2002 115 STAT. 1425
Robinson, K. (2010).
Bring on the learning revolution. TED Talks. Retrieved from
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