GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

It’s one thing to say, “All kids should wear shoes.”
Quite another to say, “Size nine, across the board.”

There comes a point at which the idea that each kid should proceed at his/her own best pace comes into contradiction with the idea that we should have the same goals for each student.

I know of a second grade teacher who used to let her students differentiate themselves in math through the year. At the start of the year, the kids were in one big group, and through the year the class was split up and resplit up into many groups. Every kid was encouraged to learn as much as s/he could. At the end of the year, as best I could tell, each kids really learned as much math as s/he could. And that meant that that some of the kids learned “years” more than others. That, of course, goes somewhat against grade by grade standards.

More importantly, it points out that different kids have different abilities and when allowed to proceed at their own optimal paces will learn differently and end up at different places.

So, I have great problems with universal standards.

But I also have a problem with unrealistic standards. Given universal standards — and that is a given, unfortunately — there is a question of where to set the bar to make it most useful for improving education in this country.

High publicity standards efforts, like Common Core, seem to aimed at the high end. But I don’t think that they are realistic for most schools or most students. Why set standards that are not attainable in the near future by most students? Who is being helped? What does it mean to define what future math majors will need to be prepared to do when they get to college? That helps k12 education? How?

I kinda feel like we have AP for that. That already tells us what the top students in particular subjects ought to be able to do. If standards are universal — and we know that they meant to be — being vague then AP is not the answer. Rather, they should be lower. Something that all students have a shot at, or at least 50% + 1.

In my very cynical view, 50% +1 of the kids at good suburban schools with well educated parents and a quiet place to do their homework can meet these sorts of standards, if well taught. But what about other students? English language learners? Families without a history of college education, or even of high school graduation? What about kids who don’t have a place to study at home, or even time to do so? What about schools whose entire student bodies are full of those kids?

Frankly, I don’t think that standards setting bodies think about those schools or those students. I am not saying that they willfully choose to ignore them, but that doesn’t mean that they are not ignoring them.

Alex,

I’m glad that you’re pushing this analogy. I think it has been quite instructive in demonstrating that we differ on a few key underlying assumptions. So with hopes I don’t take us too far down the rabbit hole…

I come to the table the assumption that there are shared goals that exist for all children. I’m not convinced these goals extend from K-12, and in fact, more often than not think that what I view as these shared goals really belong in the elementary and perhaps middle school level. To stick with our analogy, I think that we general understand that there are a variety of footwear and appropriate times to wear different footwear (in a purely form follows function way). Our schools need to let children know how to wear what shoes to accomplish particular goals. They also need to teach children how to complete these tasks that will be expected of them once they’re wearing their shoes. Now I don’t have anything against individualized instruction if we’re defining that by saying, “Johnny doesn’t know much about sneakers but he’s almost there with running and loves to run. Let’s finish the running part and tie the sneakers in later.” However, I don’t think it’s true to say that Susie doesn’t need to know how to run in sneakers.

My great fear with those who prefer a completely decentralized approach is that Johnny will never learn about sneakers and Susie won’t be able to run at all, while Michael learned about both of those things at home. Now Michael is a successful runner, just as we expect from all of our children, but Susie and Johnny never even had the opportunity to learn to run. Serving individual needs and desires is all well and good, but I find it hard to reconcile with the recognition that so many of the issues that face the most challenged students are systemic rather than endemic– poverty, instability in the family, cultural differences in expectations for various schooling relationships, funding, physical space, housing segregation, etc. If we understand these conditions which create a huge barrier to learning outcomes as coming from outside of the child, how can we expect catering to the individual will overcome these differences rather than nurture them? Moving too far to the individualistic approach suffers due to its potential to reinforce determinism of systems-pressures.

Similarly, too far into the standards direction and we will found ourselves squashing individualism, cultural identities, and special talents. However, as Alex has so eloquently noted in the past, standards are not tests and they are not curriculum. I’d extend this line by adding that curriculum is not teaching methods or learning processes. As creative as we need to be in the classroom and in our schools, we need to be articulate from a systems perspective on what we view the purpose of school. Standards are about purpose, they are about defining what a degree means (or what it means to be a middle schooler versus elementary school student), and they’re particularly important to students who don’t come to school from a rich, literate, learning environment.

LMAO