Where Did the Curriculum Standards come from?
Federal Regional Education Laboratories
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for Teaching To Standards
ABOUT CURRICULUM STANDARDS
Yale Child Study Center says 6 out of every 1,000 preschoolers are expelled each year. Could the reason be all about making preschool more about academics than about socialization and constructive play? Preschools feel the pressure to bump up the academic portion of their programs to better prepare students for kindergarten. For many, though, the push comes too young and the result is frustration and inappropriate behavior. "Maybe Preschool Is the Problem." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/weekinreview/22stein.html
Fuzzy Standards by Ferdi Serim
"What we're really measuring is seat time, not ownership of knowledge".
HARD SCIENCE EXPLAINS WHY PLAY IS IMPORTANT
WHO ?
The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC 20036 (202) 797-6000 | Fax (202) 797-6004
AWASH IN A SEA OF STANDARDS By Robert J. Marzano and John S. Kendall / Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory, Inc. 1998 Abstract Whole Article
Where?
No Child Left Behind Act is wasteful and utopian, & no different from other programs, but it requires States to develop uniform curricula for gifted, bright, bright normal, normal, dull normal, morons, imbeciles, and idiots alike.
Most educators cite the 1983 report A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) as the starting point for the current emphasis on education standards. Who will soon forget the chilling words often quoted from that report: "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people. . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament" (p. 5). The concern about the viability of our education system engendered by A Nation at Risk eventually led to the first education summit in September, 1989, during which President Bush and the nation's governors agreed upon six broad goals under the title The National Education Goals Report: Building a Nation of Learners (National Education Goals Panel [NEGP], 1991). (The initial set of goals was expanded to eight goals in 1994). Implicit and explicit in these goal statements was the mandate for American educators to identify rigorous standards regarding what students should know and be able to do in core academic areas. Subject-matter organizations quickly mobilized to establish content standards in their respective areas. Most groups looked to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) for guidance, given the success of their document, Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics. Many of the subject-matter groups were funded by the U.S. Department of Education. To date, standards documents have been published by virtually every national subject-matter organization. Exhibit 1 lists those documents considered the official standards documents in their subject areas.
teaching to state standards, state educational standards, state teaching standard
H.R. 1804 GOALS 2000: EDUCATE AMERICA ACT
www.achieve.org is the nonprofit creation of a group of business CEOs and the National Governors' Association that is currently co-chaired by IBM's chief executive officer, Louis V. Gerstner Jr., and Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin. Among other things, Achieve is busily posting state standards in English, math, science, and social studies. Building on pioneering work with the Mid-continent Regional Education Laboratory, or McREL, in Aurora, Colo., the standards of each state are "normalized." In simple English, this means that at this moment, 40 states' standards (and one foreign country's) are rendered in comprehensible and comparable "chunks." For example, you can call up all geometry standards for grades 6-8 for a given state. Each state or country can be compared with another in a very useful, side-by-side screen presentation.
Federal Regional Education Laboratories
Heritage Foundation's "backgrounder" was at: http://www.heritage.org/heritage/library/backgrounder/bg1200.html
In what the Heritage Foundation calls "Backgrounder" papers, Nina Shokrail, the author, raises the issue of whether the United States Congress should overhaul the Federal Regional Education Laboratories.
She concludes that "Members of Congress interested in streamlining the federal role in education should examine the research conducted in OERI laboratories and demand more accountability in return for the approximately $50 million the labs receive from the federal government every year."
The funding actually goes to well-paid professionals functioning as middlemen, sitting in comfortable offices distant from the classroom, and devoting much of their energy to ensuring that their federal gravy train does not halt on the tracks.
Some of the things wrong with the lab she says are:
- the questionable quality and value of the research:
- " But a 1997 District and State Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education found that nearly half of the states and districts that had contact with regional labs found them to be of little or no help in understanding or implementing comprehensive standards-based reform. 21"
- lack of objectivity,
- the promotion of fads,
- flaws in research,
- failed reform by the Office of Assistance and Dissemination (ORAD) in 1994 (designed primarily to guide and monitor the activities of the regional educational laboratories) by the lobbying efforts of the Council on Educational Development and Research (CEDaR) initially established to represent the interests of these labs.
- A June 1993 analysis of OERI and its labs by Maris Vinovskis, former Research Advisor to the Assistant Secretary at OERI and currently a professor at the Department of History and Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan says,"Labs have different methods of evaluation and place different degrees of importance on research. Yet all use the term "research-based" to describe the programs they promote, even though "[they] don't have the luxury of running controlled experiments," as Wesley Hoover, President and CEO of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, admits. 29 At the same time, "Direct Instruction," a program which uses memorization and drill and has been proven to be effective in boosting the academic outcomes of disadvantaged students, 30 is not widely distributed or prominently featured by the labs because it is not interesting to the teachers who have to use it. "[The] program will not work," claims Hoover, because "75 percent of teachers in our Elementary schools come from a whole language background. You need something else that `walks them through Direct Instruction.'"
- " The Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory (McREL) emphasizes working "collaboratively with its clients to improve educational policy and practice through the application of knowledge from research, development, and experience." 36 It has produced some useful policy papers, but many are little more than a catalog of research, without adequate attention given to the quality of the work or the diversity of material in the field. 37
- In addition, there are serious flaws in the way the lab tallied the results of a questionnaire it sent to local public school superintendents in the seven states it serves. Although the overall response rate was only 40 percent and varied among the states, the analysts simply grouped all of the returns together to get an overall regional profile. 38
Vinovskis concluded that after spending $811 million of taxpayer money between 1966 and 1991, the labs had little to show for it by way of success.
Warren Buffett's gift of $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will double the foundation's assets, bringing it to more than $60 billion, and will increase its annual giving to nearly $3 billion. Never before has an individual given such a large amount of money to someone else's foundation, writes Diane Ravitch. Never before has a private foundation had assets of this dimension. Never before has any individual or foundation had so much power to direct the course of American education, which is one of the primary interests of the Gates Foundation. Educators are waiting with bated breath to see which direction this multibillion-dollar behemoth will take.Diane Ravitch National Standards in American Education A Citizen's Guide
Andrew J. Coulson Market Education: The Unknown History
Are Public Schools Hazardous To Public Education? EDUCATION WEEK "COMMENTARY"APRIL 7TH, 1999
Review of Market Education By Myron Lieberman THE WEEKLY STANDARD, MAY 10, 1999 (p. 35) School’s Out The Case for Competition By Myron Lieberman