Today, the AFT released Sizing Up State Standards 2008*, which finds some states making meaningful progress in developing grade-by-grade content standards for English, math, science and social studies.

Virginia scored 100%, and 15 others were above 75% -- not bad since we used more rigorous criteria this year.

Some states are still lagging, though (including a half-dozen or so with no standards meeting the AFT's criteria).  So, we're recommending these states cheat off their neighbors.  That is, we're suggesting they adopt/adapt strong standards from other states or, better still, get together with nearby states to create common standards, curricula and assessments. Hmmm...that last recommendations sounds familiar.

*Guess I should retract an old post, The Top 10 Signs the Standards Movement Might Be Dead, in which I suggested that if you played an Al Shanker podcast backwards, you could hear him say, "Standards, schmandards."

Posted by John at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by Beth at AFT

When looking for good news about American public education, the focus is usually at the elementary level.  The truth is, reform is difficult in high school, dropout rates are embarrassingly low, and most scores are stagnant.

But, as it turns out, the Lake Wobegon effect is alive and well in American high schools.  According to a recent Census Bureau report, in 2003, 75 percent of students between the ages of 12 and 17 were academically “on track” (see Table 9) -- that is, enrolled in school at or above grade level, a six-percentage point increase from 1994. The report also found that nearly 1 in 4 students in the same age group were en­rolled either in gifted or advanced subject-matter classes.

So maybe we should set our sights higher, like 110 percent proficiency by 2010?

Posted by Guest at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Amy and Heidi 

Last month, AFT released a 50-state report called Smart Testing: Let’s Get It Right, which examined the quality of states’ content standards. Today, the Fordham Foundation released its own similar study, The State of State Standards 2006. As it has been in the past, Fordham is largely in agreement with AFT’s big-picture findings: Many of the states that they cite as being leaders are ones that we, too, identified, and we both generally agree about which states have made significant progress in the past five years. However, Fordham’s Gadfly last month suggested that AFT’s analysis “suffers from grade inflation.”

Now that their report is out, we find this appraisal a bit ironic, given that Fordham’s review is more lenient than the AFT’s in terms of the standards states are writing in English. Fordham gave B’s and C’s to nine states whose reading standards suffer from significant repetition. In other words, Fordham reviewers seem to think it’s okay if a state’s reading standards in grade 4 are primarily the same as its reading standards in grade 5, grade 6, or (as we found in one case) grade 8. In contrast, the AFT believes that specific and unique standards are crucial at each and every grade, not just so that we don’t bore kids to death, but also to establish common and clear state expectations for what should be taught and learned at every year of school. If we transposed AFT’s findings to letter grades, we would have given those same nine states an F and the scoring would look like this:

If we’re talking grade inflation, the Fordham Foundation is far too lenient in giving states high marks for English standards that are vague and, in some cases, virtually identical from grade to grade. So, we guess Fordham thinks that grade inflation is a more serious concern than boring the pants off students by covering the same standards from year to year? Of these two schools of thought, personally we’d rather go to ours.

Posted by Guest at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)