We’re getting a peek at the draft academic standards that a work group is putting together.
Core Knowledge, an advocacy group that calls for giving students deep grounding in content across subjects, has posted a draft copy of the common, multistate standards on its Web site—and it argues that the document completely misses the mark.
“Voluntary National Standards Dead on Arrival” reads the headline on the Core Knowledge blog.
The draft document represents the first step in an effort being led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to create common academic standards across states. Achieve, the ACT, and the College Board are also working on the project. The first set of standards, which the organizations have said they hoped to have completed by the end of this month, focuses on the standards for college and career readiness in language arts and math. Copies of the draft document had been circulating among some organizations for review, Robert Pondiscio, the communications director at Core Knowledge, wrote on the blog entry. His group decided to post them, because they saw no restrictions on doing so, he said.
The organization’s view of the draft document is highly negative. Here’s a piece from the online blog entry:
“The draft insists that the voluntary standards be ‘coherent’ but defines coherence to mean they ‘should convey a unified vision of the big ideas and supporting concepts within a discipline and reflect a progression of learning that is meaningful and appropriate.’ Framed as a series of benchmarks students must reach ‘to be college and career ready,’ the draft enumerates standards such as the ability to ‘determine what text says explicitly and use evidence within text to infer what is implied by or follows logically from the text.’
“To put this as blandly as possible, this is neither a revelatory insight nor a meaningful standard. Educators hoping for guidance on what particular texts are expected to be taught, or how to get students to reach the bland and obvious standards will be disappointed.”
Obviously, Core Knowledge has its own view of what should go into academic standards, and others reviewing the document will have their own. After you’ve had a look, give me your opinion.
UPDATE from guest blogger Catherine Gewertz: Gene Wilhoit of the CCSSO and Dane Linn of the NGA said it’s too early to draw conclusions about the draft, since it lacks the feedback from working groups tasked to review it, and from governors and state chiefs. Once all that feedback is in, a revised draft—with evidence supporting each standard—will be available online, in mid-August, for further public comment. Wilhoit and Linn’s overall message? That this draft represents just the first step in a much longer process.
UPDATE (2): Lynne Munson, the president and executive director of Common Core, in Washington, which also advocates for giving students a strong grounding across disciplines, calls the Core Knowledge group’s pronouncement “premature,” though she shares some of their concerns. In a blog entry, Munson says that the common standards effort is “is too coordinated, too strategically smart, and has too much momentum to be dismissed out of hand.”
Munson says that the standards draft risks repeating what she says are the mistakes of the the No Child Left Behind era, in which reading was approached “purely as a skill” and “overlooks the key role that substantial content plays in teaching students to read.” Yet she also says that the effort is “still in its nascent stages” and so “condemnations are premature.”
Read our full story on reactions to the standards here.