Why Standards-Based Teaching Has Failed to Raise Reading Achievement
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22 February, 2015
11 Comments
| Blast from the Past: This was originally posted on February 22, 2015 and was reposted on January 4, 2018. This blog entry explains one important reason why standards-based teaching is not improving reading achievement. There are others--the over-emphasis on teaching, the lack of sufficient and appropriate professional development, the misinterpretation of standards as narrow easily tested skills--all serve to undermine success. Nevertheless, the emphasis on teaching activities instead of on learning will undercut kids learning progress. Standards-based educational reform goes back to the early 1990s. Since then, test scores have see-sawed a bit, but for the most part, we are doing about as well as we’ve been doing since 1970 (when we first started collecting national reading data). That means standards-based reform has not led to higher achievement. Establishing educational goals and aligning teaching to those goals to ensure kids succeed has not happened. Diane Ravitch and others who don’t spend much time in schools claim to know why standards have failed. They believe that if teachers were just left to their own devices, American kids would excel in school. Unlike them, I’ve spent much time in classrooms and working with kids over the past four decades or so…as teacher, lunchroom supervisor, park supervisor, student teacher, tutor, researcher, remediator, teacher educator, observer, evaluator, school administrator, textbook author, test designer, parent, grandparent, and uncle. My take on the problem is different, but I do agree that it is a problem. I have come to believe that standards-based reform will NEVER work unless educators come to understand the idea of standards-based teaching, something that has not happened during the past 25 years. To illustrate my point, I received the following two notes from teachers last week: I teach 4th grade in a Daily 5/Cafe school. We have NO curriculum or requirements other than... 2 mini-lessons, conferring individually and maintaining strategy groups with students. Do you have any advice or thoughts on the organizing and planning within these four areas? I am working on a district committee that is developing a universal literacy framework for our elementary schools. One of the recommended components is shared reading, which is not currently a formalized daily practice at our highest-achieving schools. Is there an argument, based on research, for this component to be mandated for all classrooms as part of an excellent literacy program? The research that I have found seems to mainly focus on pre-schoolers. What sense do I make of these queries? They reveal that their schools are dedicated to promoting particular activities and practices—not to teaching children. There are particular activities these principals and teachers want to see in classrooms, and they are not particularly focused on what they are supposed to be engaged in: teaching children to read. Instead of focusing like-a-laser on they want kids to know, to be able to do, to be, they are promoting favorite classroom activities. Instead of thinking about how to get kids to a particular outcome, they are wondering if they can somehow align the required activities with useful outcomes. It would be like a surgeon deciding what kind of surgery he wanted to conduct and then hoping to stretch it to the patient’s needs (“Sorry Mr. Jones. I know you have prostate cancer, but I like to do hysterectomies.”) Until we actually focus on teaching the standards—that is, until we decide that our job is to ensure that kids learn what we have agreed to teach them—then it will continue to look like our kids are failing. (And, no, “test prep” is not teaching to our standards, it is just one more example of educators focusing on particular activities rather than on reaching particular outcomes). |
2/23/2105
Well said, Tim.
By the way, the thrust of your argument can be extended to support national standards. What makes us think that just letting every teacher do what he or she thinks is right is not dissimilar from letting every school, district, or state have their unfettered way with curriculum and teaching.
What’s worse? A national orthodoxy (that we can all watch carefully, evaluate, tweak to tame its weakness, and maybe even nurture) or 15,000 local orthodoxies.
But the real message is developing an approach (really a set of tools that includes standards, assessments of all sorts—with the real emphasis on formative, materials—curriculum if you will, and then and only then, classroom activities to promote growth on the standards). I agree that everyone wants to start out with the activities, just like researchers tend to start out with methods (I want to do a qualitative study or an experiment).
2/23/2015
This is the first time I want to give an unequivocal YES!!!! to something you have written. I've sat in classrooms, first as a behavior consultant and then as a reading consultant for 20 years....watching project after project with students expected to learn from "exposure" not practice. After ed schools pounded into their prospective teachers the dangers of any sort of "Drill and Kill," practice of any sort ...even well designed "drill and thrill" practice was too much of a source of guilt to include in any lesson in the now curriculum-deficit schools. Given that the average person needs between 5 and 15 exposures/practice until new learning enters long term memory, we now have two generations of students who have exited typical public schools, knowing little. Coaches understand setting goals and practice; music teachers understand setting goals and practice. And the much maligned Japanese understand setting goals and practice. No surprise that in graphic novels, graphics, virtual world development, and game design, the Japanese are exhibiting astounding creativity. Knowledge (not just exposure) is a critical underlying ingredient for creativity.
2/23/2015
Thanks, David. That’s an interesting point and one that I don’t disagree with. I believe, in core areas of education, there isn’t much point in having big differences in educational goals. While the states do differ to some extent economically (in terms of the types of work done in their states), I think the similarities of what kids need to know about reading and math overwhelm any particular differences you could identify. The idea of each teacher going his or her own way seems obviously foolish to me; and the argument in these core areas is just as clear when you talk about schools, school districts, regions, and states. If it is important and valuable to be able to read and summarize the major points in a science text in Massachusetts, I assume it is important and valuable to be able to do that in Alabama, too.
However, I don’t think we can have federal education standards, but I do think we can have common ones. Too hard politically to get the left and right together at the same time in terms of the appropriate role for a federal government to play in education (short of a Constitutional amendment). However, if those arguing against common standards these days really believe in states’ rights then they must accept the idea that the sovereign states have the power to enter into cooperative agreements with each other in areas like health, law enforcement, and education. And, the idea that the federal government might encourage or facilitate such sharing and cooperation seems well within its constitutional responsibilities.
I hadn’t thought of it in this context, but you are absolutely right. When education researchers set out, not to understand something better, but to conduct a particular kind of research study, things don’t work well. Conceptually, research should be conducted to answer questions, settle arguments, solve problems—not to exercise particular research skills. I missed it, but it is exactly the same problem facing schools. Too often teachers have no idea what it is that they are trying to accomplish in terms of kids’ learning and they have no idea of how to figure out if they have gotten there (the assessment problem). Instead, they focus on the activities that they like to do or that they think kids like to do and ignore the learning problem altogether. I hate it, but I don’t think we’ve made ANY progress in getting teachers to focus on outcomes rather than activities.
Thanks.
tim
2/24/2015
More needs to be done for teachers/educators in helping them in their class rooms. Educators want to do right by their students but are rarely given good information/resources/examples/etc on how to best achieve their goal of helping student to become better.
What Are your thoughts?
Leave me a comment and I would like to have a discussion with you!
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