Saturday, May 17, 2014

Standards are of industry. Standards are not of intellect.

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.

I want to hear your thoughts!  Join the conversation in the TED-Ed Community!


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.
Fischer, K. (2014). How much do we really know about the brain? PBS.org. Retrieved from                      http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work/how.html
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



2 comments:

Mr. Schmidt said...

Nice post! I think there is common ground between your concept of learning goals and the PLC process of breaking standards down into kid-friendly learning targets. PLCs are also big on formative assessment. BTW, I'm also a Montessori fan!

Della Remack, Ed.D. said...

Common ground is a path to progress in education! We need more collaboration and less compromise. Learning is a process and assessment is best used to inform the process, not judge it. The more we think together, agree, disagree, discuss, mull, and reason, the faster we will transform a system into an environment fit to educate lifelong learners and tomorrow's leaders.