(Vol. 2, No. 1 - Winter 1998)
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Questions and Answers
about Standards and School Reform
Q. I keep hearing about standards in connection with school reform.
What are we talking about here?
A. Let's boil this down to the essentials. A "standard" is a description
of something you want a student to learn. A well-defined goal. The phrase
educators like to use is something a student will "know and be able
to do." The schools in Jefferson County have developed a list of these
standards in every subject, and teachers are supposed to use them to make
decisions about what to teach.
Q. How is that different from what they've always done?
A. Teachers have used curriculum guides and similar documents in the past
to help decide what to teach. Or they've depended on textbooks-beginning
on page one and going as far as they can during the school year. Standards
are a little different. They tell teachers (and students) what kids are
expected to know at the end of the teaching and learning process so that
teachers can examine everything they do with this question in mind: "Is
what I'm teaching part of what we have agreed we want kids to know?"
Q. I still don't get the difference. Can you give me an example?
A. Here's a social studies example. The teacher is expected to teach kids
about ancient civilizations. That's a big topic, with an almost endless
array of facts, bits of folklore, customs, etc. What's most important about
ancient Egypt? How to make a mummy? What a pyramid was used for? Kids love
this kind of stuff, but how does it connect to the "big themes"
of history? What can we learn from Egyptian culture that helps us understand
more about humankind in general?
When we look at the JCPS standards, we see that teachers are to help students
"recognize the influence of geography, economic factors, cultural values
and belief systems, and science and technology on human history." They're
to "use key concepts such as chronology, causality, conflict, and complexity
to analyze and explain historical change and continuity." When teachers
approach their lessons with these goals in mind, they're less likely to
prepare kids to answer a question like: "Why were the pyramids built?"
and more likely to prepare kids to thoughtfully discuss a question like
"How did the ancient Egyptians' beliefs about death shape their civilization?"
Q. What about the basics? Is this just the latest education fad
that will get us even further away from teaching the fundamentals of reading,
writing and arithmetic?
A. Ask yourself why schools seem to have such a hard time teaching the basics.
If you don't spend much time in schools, you may assume that it's "just
these kids today," that they don't want to learn, that their parents
don't care, and so forth. But researcher Ronald Ferguson has examined more
than 60 studies of student achievement and concluded that only half of the
problems of low achievement can be attributed to factors outside the school.
What teachers are able to do accounts for most of the rest.
When you spend a lot of time in schools, talking to teachers and principals,
you soon realize that schools have not done a very good job of organizing
what they teach. Traditionally, teachers haven't talked to each other much.
In some schools in JCPS, as recently as a year ago, teachers in the 6th,
7th, and 8th grade might be teaching the same material to students without
even knowing it. A standards-based school doesn't leave the curriculum to
chance. Everybody knows what needs to be taught and teachers talk to each
other regularly not only to keep clear about who's teaching what but to
agree on what students should be able to do before they meet the standard.
The basics are part of the standards, and when it's done right, standards
help guarantee that students don't drift through school without acquiring
the fundamental tools they need to build on their learning.
Q. I keep hearing about "content standards" and "performance
standards." What's the difference?
A. Content standards tell us what students should know. Performance standards
tell us when students know enough to be "proficient." A performance
standard actually describes how students should perform to meet a content
standard. Here's an example for writing from a draft JCPS document (a lot
of this material is still under development).
The content standard says: "Students write using appropriate forms,
conventions, and styles to communicate ideas and information to different
audiences for different purposes." That standard could apply to any
grade. But the performance standard is specifically for grade 4: "The
student writes a short story which is focused on a purpose; communicates
with an audience; has evidence of voice or suitable tone; shows depth of
idea development supported by elaborated, relevant details; has logical,
coherent organization; has controlled and varied sentence structure; employs
acceptable, effective language; and has few errors in spelling punctuation,
and capitalization relative to length and complexity."
Q. Whew! Do teachers really know when a student has met this standard?
A. Ideally, as schools actually implement standards, teachers look at a
performance standard together, along with samples of student work, and discuss
whether the student papers meet the standard and why. This is really a kind
of professional development for teachers-it helps every teacher get a clear
understanding of what quality work looks like. To support this process,
the district is developing examples of acceptable work to go along with
each performance standard. This is sometimes called "providing a benchmark."
In the case of the example above, the district used an actual student short
story called "Turkey Disguise" which has notes in the margins
describing why the paper meets various parts of the performance standard.
Eventually, the district says, it will provide sample tasks and benchmark
student papers for most if not all standards. And the district is quick
to point out that these benchmark examples will not only help teachers,
they'll show parents and students what acceptable work looks like.
Q. How will this change what teachers do?
A. Teachers will be expected to develop performance tasks of their own so
they can regularly take a measure of how well their students are learning-how
far they are from meeting the standard. "We have to shift our thinking
about why we assess," says one JCPS teacher leader. "Most teachers
assess so students can get a grade. But this assessment is about finding
out what kids know." Teachers will still use other kinds of assessment-multiple
choice, true-false, pop quizzes, etc. to check students' grasp of small
pieces of knowledge and information. Performance tasks will be used to see
how well students can assemble and think about all the pieces of their learning.
Q. How far along is this standards process?
A. It's really just beginning. The middle schools are a little further along
because they've been talking about standards seriously for a year or more.
But, frankly, most teachers have not taken the discussion about standards-based
teaching very seriously yet. That's likely to change soon, when the district
begins distributing the performance standards and benchmarks, which really
give teachers something they can sink their teeth into. The district is
planning a general awareness campaign for the early spring. And in the summer,
teams from every school in the district will spend about four days learning
how to use the performance standards in their everyday teaching. They'll
be expected to return to their schools and spread the word.
Q. Is this really going to change anything? Or is this just one
more facelift?
A. Good question. A lot depends on whether teachers decide that a standards-based
approach to teaching can really raise student achievement. And whether the
district can provide enough support for teachers to learn to do things differently.
That will require money, coaching, and, most important, time. If anything
kills the effort, it will probably be the lack of time for teachers to learn
how to redesign their teaching around standards. It's hard work and it can't
be accomplished in occasional half-hour sessions at the end of a long school
day. Schools will probably have to restructure the way they use time, and
that means buy-in from the unions and from parents. It'll be a tough sell.
Read an interview about standards and school reform
Visit our standards index page
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