You may remember from the recent special session the statutory changes the legislature needed to make to be eligible to apply for $175 million dollars in education funding from the federal “Race to the Top Program.”
Having made the change removing the prohibition on the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations, the next step is to adopt a set of common core standards put together by a consortium of states. As a member of the Council to Establish Academic Standards, I take very seriously Nevada’s role in setting high standards for our students. While standards for history and social studies benefit from a Nevada-specific perspective, I’ve been watching this effort to create common standards for core subjects like math and English with interest for sometime now.
Provided that the standards don’t result in a diminishing of expectations for our students, there is strength in numbers. A team of states developing standards can realize efficiency gains (standards review processes are complex, exhaustive and have to account for every aspect of a subject) and the resulting standards can better benchmark student performance across the states.
Tomorrow morning, a meeting of the Council to Establish Academic Standards will meet to review and adopt these standards so that Nevada can apply for the Race to the Top Grant, funding that is welcome given our current budget crisis. I encourage to review the standards, as well as the Common Core Standards Memorandum of Agreement, and the Race to the Top Requirements Related to Common Core Standards. You can learn more about the common core effort at www.commoncore.org.
What do you think about this issue?
I wish I had more time to give you more thoughtful feedback on this issue today. I will have to rely on one point. Currently our most at risk elementary students receive a very narrowed curriculum of basically only reading and math based on the very erroneous assumption that they are so far behind in those areas (which is true) that we need to wait on teaching them a rich curriculum that includes science, social studies, the arts, a PE program and so on. The problem is that learning to read relies much more on students general knowledge of the world around them than people tend to understand.
Therefore when students are taught phonics, for example, the theory is that they sound out the word and get at least close to proper pronunciation and then voila! they recognize the word and go on reading. But what if you have a very poor vocabulary and very little knowledge of your world? Then you have no schema to bank on to know the words or what they represent. So we narrow the curriculum and that cuts the very subjects that builds the schema they require to understand and bring meaning to what they read.
My current class of 4th graders when on the 2nd day of school were asked what city they lived in … less than 25% knew (6 of 25 students), which state? – same result, which country? 3 out of 25 students knew what country they lived in. They have like-wise general knowledge about their world they bring to bear to understand reading and math.
So please don’t allow the science, social studies, geography, art, PE and other standards get narrowed out by a focus on meeting the reading standards … its ALL reading. Without the knowledge from those other subjects reading instruction suffers greatly … as does math.
Just a thought.
Thanks.