National consensus is too much to assume. Absolutely. We can barely even reach campus or district consensus. State consensus is a joke. Besides, consensus doesn’t create professionals. It takes a lot more than that. I’m not even sure consensus is a necessary part of professionalism.

Dan, your line about pursuing “the perfect at the expense of improvement” ignores a painful truth: conversations around standards and curriculum are never opening volleys; they are crushing spikes that end all discussion. If we want to improve, let’s keep the conversation going once the list has been created. However, we all know that’s not how it works. Once the curriculum is in place, it’s there to stay. The standards for both our subject areas were adopted in 1997 with no discussion of improvement and no plans for refinement since then.

We should all be hesitant to put something in place that we know is flawed because it’ll be there for a long, long time before anyone even thinks to do anything about it. Education does not take incremental steps toward perfection like you suggest. It takes one huge step at a time, perhaps with 10 years between steps. Don’t talk about the public education system as if it were a well-oiled machine that’s prepared to change tack at the first sign of distress. Our classrooms might work like that, but the system certainly does not.

“Students successful in Algebra II are 50% more likely to graduate from college. My conclusion is that more students need to succeed in math (Algebra II) …”

raises my overactive “causation-or-merely-correlation” radar.

Yes, students who succeed in Alg 2 are more likely to graduate from college. Also true: students who eat dinner as a family unit more nights than not are are also more likely to graduate from college. Do we need to make sure families eat dinner together, too, as well as making more kids suffer through Algebra II?

I hope this didn’t sound snarky. I really don’t mean it that way. I just worry when people credit credit math courses for delivering certain outcomes that are more likely caused by *other attributes* of the students who take said math courses. Am I outrageously wrong?

–Sandy (Slacker/almost-flunker of Algebra 2 in 1973, successful in college and life nonetheless)

whiiiiine, does it have to be easily graded?! What would it look like ideally and what would it look like in practice?

In science, I could see perhaps a comparison of three studies. Students would review the three studies, identify the important components, and then discuss using both their knowledge and their analytical skills which of the studies was the best designed and why, what questions the results pose for further study and then describe an experiment to test one of those questions.

There. That’s one. Not necessarily totally difficult to grade; there could easily be at least a key of “obvious problems” “more difficult to discern problems” and maybe a category of “wow, why didn’t we notice that!” with codes attached for grading purposes.

Same sort of thing perhaps for a literature based assignment. Read an essay or an excerpt and write an essay on a given topic and hand in and perhaps answer some short answer questions about grammar, or vocabulary or the like. Then read two reviews or essays about the about the original piece and write an essay analyzing the different viewpoints and talking about how your opinion has or has not changed/been strengthened/been broadened.

I could actually see using something like this at the elementary level — obviously with appropriate level material. I think the having an opinion first, then seeing other opinions and then *rethinking* is a valuable learning/thinking skill that can be taught.

Give them a formula and values and they can plug in or move it around and do great. Give them a series of steps to solve a problem, and they can do it.

Ask them to pull from existing knowledge to create a new formula or build their own series of steps.. not so much.

Your statement about “if they know how to think” is crucial but how do we measure that with easily graded mandated assessments?

But, even my current professor (who of course, is younger than I am!) said they’ve noticed the change in students over the last 5 or so years. Their test scores may be “proficient” but that’s exactly what they can do — they can take what you tell them and tell you it back. They have less knowledge overall and they have a very hard time seeing problems in logic.

Now, all anecdotal of course, but if NCLB and standards as is were working, it seems like we’d have seen at least a slight jump upwards. Although I guess we sort of have — just not in skills that really do a lot of good academically.

Any well-prepared student (at the higher bar level at least) should be able to learn anything they need in college IF they come in knowing how to think and with a large basic reservoir of knowledge.

I just wanted to repeat that, and add that this is something that should happen regularly (annually or so?).

We need to do some serious alignment between what the eventual employers need, what the colleges determine is an entry level amount of knowledge and what we teach at the K12 level.

Unfortunately, because of our segmented education system and department, decisions are made at the federal level with lofty ideals and real consequences for local schools, and rather than adopt their ideals and work for them in a meaningful way, panic ensues and some people try to game the system.

We do need a floor. And a measurement of how cohorts of students move towards that standard. But we also need a bar, a goal, a acknowledgment of the students who not only are standing on the floor, but have jumped over a second bar. There needs to be something better than passing to strive for and be rewarded for. For both teachers and students. And we cannot rely solely on the AP program to set that bar or you get the recent debacle with the AP Computer Science AB exam.

Look at the news (MSNBC as of yesterday) for the 30 fastest growing jobs. 4 of the top 10 are in computers and technology – yet the Collegeboard canceled one of the two AP computer science exams without even consulting their own computer science development committee.

A national curriculum with national standards set for two levels, basic and excellent is much needed. We also need to choose to stop letting private organizations (AP and IB) decide what subjects are important.

Then the state and the local could choose from the voluminous standards they’ve already got (which are often immense, yet also overlapping, repetitive, and still glaringly incomplete in some things) and add in what they think really needs to be added in, here’s hoping that it’s in some ways a la carte — teach at least one of these [time periods/scientific theories/etc.] in depth, covering at least [list of important stuff]. This would also be far more helpful for teaching gifted students — you could add on another topic, or require more depth in the given topic with a road map right in front of you.

States could still give harder, based on their less basic standards, and assuming the floor ability tests. Some states would be known to have really stupidly silly tests (as they do now) and others would be known for their very difficult tests.

But, we’d still know that there was a floor. The biggest problem with NCLB, wait, biggest two problems are not acknowledging big gains — say from 3 years below grade level to less than a year below in one year of teaching (yes, they’ve given some states this) and tracking individual kids rather than comparing different kids each year, and not acknowledging that while all kids deserve to achieve at that floor level and should be worked with until they do…we still don’t live in Lake Wobegon and we’re never all going to be way above average.