Standardized Confusion

If you haven’t had this happen already, soon someone from outside of education is bound to ask you about the debate taking place around our state standards.  It’s front page news locally and makes national news regularly.  Unfortunately, the loudest voices seem to get the most attention, so the shouting matches continue to escalate.  Should we dump Common Core?  Are the new standards any better (or worse) than the old standards?  Who gets to decide and who gets left out?  What’s all the fuss about?

Forewarned is forearmed, so you might want to take a look at what is creating all of the consternation.  This is the link to the proposed standards on the IDOE website: Proposed Indiana Academic Standards

Spoiler Alert: This is not easy reading.  You may find yourself lost in the long list of English and Math standards.  If you teach outside these content areas, you can make lots of connections to your content, but it takes some thoughtful work to do so.  If you want a visual “Cliff Note” to the new standards, watch this short summary video from the Center for Excellence in Leadership of Learning.  CELL is based at the University of Indianapolis and does a great job of keeping us current on issues facing educators.  Use this link to see the five-minute CELL video: Indiana’s Proposed Standards Overview

Do Standards Matter?

As I read through Indiana’s long list of standards and watched the CELL video, I kept thinking back to a book I read last summer by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo.  He says in Driven by Data:

 “Standards are meaningless until you define how to assess them.” 

It is worth your while to wrestle with that statement for a bit.  If he is right, then it doesn’t much matter whether we are looking at the “old” Indiana Standards, the Common Core, or “new” Indiana Standards.  Until we know how any of these standards will be assessed, they are simply lists of topics with little meaning.

I’m not being cynical.  This is the reality of standards.  Let me give you an example of what Bambrick-Santoyo is saying by using just one proposed grade 9/10 English/Language Arts standard on reading informational texts:

Reading Information--Standard 1: “Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.”

You can find a standard similar to this on almost every list of English standards nationwide.  Now think about all the possible ways this standard might be assessed on a standardized test, and then consider how teaching would have to change depending on the assessment. 

On the standardized test, will they….

• Ask one multiple choice question requiring the students to choose from one of four options about what might be inferred from a paragraph of text?
• Ask students to answer numerous multiple choice questions about how to use evidence to support a textual analysis?
• Ask students read a paragraph and write a two-sentence response to a question about an inference that could be drawn from a text?
• Ask students to read an extended text and write a full essay in which they analyze the text and cite textual evidence to support both explicit and inferred messages found in the text?
• Ask students to do one or more of these tasks?

Kick that around for a bit.  See if you think Paul Bambrick-Santoyo is right.  Without knowing the way this one standard will be assessed, how do we know how and to what extent to teach the standard?  And remember that this is only one of the 74 proposed English/Language Arts standards for grades 9/10.

Don’t Panic Quite Yet

There is no question that the state of Indiana is in a state of disarray when it comes to state standards, but I think there is reason for optimism, not because of what will happen legislatively but because of what we are choosing to do at the local level.  Next week I want to make an argument for why I strongly believe that Hamilton Southeastern High School is positioned correctly to handle whatever comes our way from the free-for-all taking place around standards in downtown Indy.

I am convinced that we are on the right path, and I’ll tell you why next week. 

Until next week, have a fun, Southeastern.  Promote respect, foster pride, and inspire excellence.  These are, after all, the standards we have chosen to live by at HSE.

Phil