Trego's Mountain Ear

School districts are expected to adopt standards for education, but they’re essentially required to adopt those published by the office of public instruction, and then allowed to add extras. At any rate, this does mean that ‘what every student is required by law, to learn’ is publicly available.

I occasionally find myself looking through the standards for work, and I generally come away a bit surprised. For example, if we count the various sub-standards, there are twenty-one career and technical education standards for third graders. I repeat, twenty-one.

This isn’t necessarily a critique of the standards themselves; it’s that the average teacher in a rural school is expected to be familiar with the standards for every subject they teach; and that isn’t just english/math/science/social studies. And that best practices are to be familiar with all of the standards leading up to the grades you teach. For example, an 8th grade science teacher ought to be familiar with the science standards from K-7, as well. The sheer bulk of standards is enough to make this task daunting, even within a single subject area.

“utilize critical thinking to make sense of problems and persevere in solving them” is, I believe, a generally good thing to want students to be able to do. “employ valid and reliable research strategies by representing data in multiple
formats” also seems like a good thought.

Even good ideas can be implemented badly. The overflow of standards means that explicitly tying assignments and instructions to standards, which is how teacher’s are supposed to ensure that they’re teaching what they should be, takes huge amounts of time.

Additionally, not all standards are created equally. Another 3rd grade standard is “work productively in teams while using cultural/global competence by recognizing and understanding barriers to productive communication”, which at best is going to require most of us to find a definition of cultural/global competence.

This standard: “demonstrate creativity and innovation by exploring the design cycle” sounds nice, too, but how’s the state defining the design cycle? There are resources for this, videos, summary documents, but all of it takes time.

Editor’s note: I’m not sure whether I should be classifying this as an article about education, or something about government over-reach, along the lines of ‘you need a license for what?’.