Research by Grover Whitehurst and by Tom Loveless of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, for example, finds virtually no relationship between the quality of state education standards and the achievement test scores of students in the respective states. Princeton-Brookings The Future of Children .pdf policy brief retrieved on 10.7.12 from http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/10/02-boost-literacy-haskins-sawhill/child-literacy-policy-brief
Colleagues,
Arguing that Common Core State Standards (CCSS) by themselves will not enable children -- especially those from poor families -- to reach new, much higher literacy standards, in a Fall 2012 Princeton-Brookings Institution policy brief, Can Academic Standards Boost Literacy and Close the Achievement Gap? Ron Haskins, Richard Murnane, Isabel Sawhill, and Catherine Snow identify four of the most important strategies, from The Future of Children articles, to close the literacy gap:
1. State adoption of assessments that will accompany the CCSS;
2. “A common system for reporting results that will provide schools, parents, and communities with detailed knowledge about how their students are performing relative to the Common Core and to other communities”;
3. Improved curriculum that is aligned with the CCSS; and
4. Most important, they assert, improving the quality of teaching.
Unfortunately one important evidence-based strategy, family literacy, helping the parents of children in poverty to improve their level of education, has not made it into the top four.
Nevertheless, the authors' main point is important, that just raising the bar in K-12 won’t enable every child to clear it. The same is true in adult basic education. As the authors put it, “Excellent standards are no more than a first step.”
David J. Rosen
djrosen123@gmail.com
Comments
Hi David,
Thanks for sharing this article/information with us. It is unfortunate that the adults in children's lives are not on the docket here, that feels like a missed opportunity. The gap between affluent and not affluent could be very much informed by learning about families' 'culture' - not backgrouns per se, but how they interact and function as a family. For example, when I directed a volunteer program in the 90s, a group of privileged college students were tutoring children in reading and esol in a local urban public school. The college kids were frustrated because of the 'unruliness' of many of the children which made it difficult to get down to work. We all got together with the classroom teacher who pointed out that the college students were indirect and did not 'command attention' of the kids. Their response was they weren't there to assume that type of role - one that felt awkward and unnecessarily strict. But the teacher's response was clear: well, then you will get no teaching done. She noted that these children lived in homes in which their guardians DID indeed command control over them (not in a bad way, just that the households were more strict) and that this is what they knew and were used to. In other words, the culture in which these kids grew up was vastly different than the ones that the college kids came from and so there was a disconnect in the middle that prevented success. We needed to collect information ahead of time, figure out where each side was coming from, determine how to connect, and then diagnose our efforts. We didn't do that until we were in it, and so it was much more difficult.
I'm also completely daunted by the list of 4 strategies they see as priorities in building a successful standards system: we need new assessments, new data collection/reporting system, new curriculum, new way of teaching. Basically, a complete overhaul. You're right David, it's the same in ABE as in K-12 right now. We need curricula and materials that prepare adults for the 21st century, and these need to be developed so that they demonstrate how both the student and the teacher are doing as they are doing it. I didn't see this noted in the article, but no one seems to be talking about the fact that state after state is rescinding NCLB - the very legislation that triggered the common core standards in the first place. I am wondering what that all will look like in the future....
.... makes me wax cynical, I'm afraid. Hey, the Problem Is In The HOme if we can use that as an excuse and accept the education gap, but... to say it's important enough to try to address?
... but it could be that they're stuck thinking "in the box" of schools and curricula. On the face of it, it seems it would be harder to improve the parents' literacy and/or change the culture. However, that might not be true in fact.
Hi David and all.
Thanks for initiating this conversation. I have to say I was a little thrown by the "no more than..." bit of the authors' quote. I totally agree that excellent (i.e., well constructed, valid in their content, broadly agreed upon, broadly accessible and understood) standards are the start and we have way more work to do once they are in place. But in my best-case scenario, it's the standards that make the rest of that important work possible. Quality standards give us a chance at building a comprehensive, transparent and fair system of service delivery when they're used to align what get's taught with what get tested with what gets reported with what we (learners, teachers, programs) are held accountable for. Focusing curriculum, instruction, professional development, assessment, and reporting all on the same set of widely valued and important goals...sounds like more than "no more than" to me!
Well said Peggy. Nothing can follow without aligning all the education elements "on the same set of widely valued and important goals".
If not for well thought-out and constructed standards, you have no road to follow.
What a weak strawman. Of course CCSS, alone, cannot fix this hugely complex problem. And, why only four characteristics? Rediculous! Not even close to the minimum necessary.
But, YES, we must start and four is at least that start. And we must expand the number of variables we work on simultaneously on an ongoing basis.
The only way to help all students is by continuous improvement of a significant number of those variables. that includes: Educational processes; Business processes; Teacher training and preparation; Materials; And the four factors set forth by the authors of the article/report.
Hi Arthur/2learn-English, thanks for your comment. Can you talk a bit more about how business processes can be helpful in the landscape of standards and formative assessment? I have some thoughts but want to hear yours and others. Actually, just this morning on NPR I heard a report about how business and industry has failed our K-12 system miserably by not being integrally involved. Ok, I will throw out there that most (?) industries do have a set of constructed standards that inform how their work gets done and achieved.....otherwise, they couldn't be industries, correct?
You will probably think me naive, or perhaps even mad, but IMO the simplest and surest way of closing the attainment gap is to modernise English - by reducing some of it's many needless inconsistencies (e.g. penny - many) which currently make learning to read and write the language exceptionally difficult and time-consuming.
When people had to learn the DOS commands for using a computer, few people managed this easily. The invention of windows put computer usage in the hands of millions.
The effect of English spelling inconsistencies is similar to that of DOS. Bright children, with educationally supportive parents, cope with them with relative ease. Unfortunately, just as my computer-whizzy son used to with my slow grasp of DOS, they tend to have little understanding or sympathy for those who are not so fortunate.
Yet only they have the power to change matters. So unless the educated classes develop a genuine desire to raise overall educational attainment, English spelling will remain as it is, and roughly 1 in 5 pupils in all English-speaking countries will continue to leave school functionally illiterate, with nearly 1 in 2 never learning to write confidently because of their inability to rote-learn a minimum of 3700 words with unpredictable spellings, such as 'gnu, blue, shoe, flew, through, to, zoo' and 'you'.
When something is easy to learn, nearly everybody manages to do so quickly. The simplicity of Finnish spelling enables nearly all children to learn to read and write in just a few months. Making English spelling as regular as the Finnish orthography, would be very challenging, after letting it sink deeper and deeper into the mire for many centuries. But there is much scope for substantial improvements.
There is, for example, no good reason whatsoever for continuing to use pointless and confusing surplus ‘-e’ endings, as in ‘have, imagine, promise’ (cf. save, define, demise). The whimsical spellings of short vowels, as in ‘ said, head, touch’, could also nearly all be easily amended too (sed, hed, tuch). So could erratic use of doubled consonants (shoddy – body, merry – very, rabbit - habit).
But this cannot happen until it becomes generally understand that such irregularities are educationally and fiscally very costly, and until more people develop a genuine desire to make education more widely accessible. Literacy is essential for other learning. By making literacy acquisition exceptionally difficult, current English spelling conventions condemn the educationally weak to learn almost nothing at all.
If my views make some sense to you and you would like know more, read some of my blogs. If u have a Kindle, u can also borrow my latest book from amazon for a month.
Masha BellLiteracy researcher for the English Spelling Society - www.spellingsociety.org
Author of ebook Spelling it out: the problems and costs of English spelling (2012)
www.EnglishSpellingProblems.co.uk
http://EnglishSpellingProblems.blogspot.com
http://ImprovingEnglishSpelling.blogspot.com
and Youtube video 'Why improve English spelling?'