Standards

Early Education at Risk?

Sara Mead — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:55:00 -0400

Last week's Nation at Risk anniversary spawned a boatload of commentary on the seminal report's impacts, as well as the continued shortcomings in American public education 25 years later. Thinking about Nation's impacts on early childhood and elementary education can be perplexing. As E.D. Hirsch notes in Education Week, the original report gave barely a mention to early education, focusing primarily on the need to dramatically improve academic rigor and core course-taking at the high school level. Yet it's undeniable that the standards-based education movement that emerged out of Nation has led to significant reforms in early education--and that early education reforms have actually be more aggressive, and have produced greater results, than have reforms at the high school level Nation's authors originally sought to affect.

Pre-kindergarten: Publicly funded pre-kindergarten was hardly unheard of before Nation at Risk--the federal Head Start program began in 1965. But the universal pre-k movement at the state level emerged in the 1990s in conjunction with state K-12 education reform efforts--particularly in Southern states that have led the charge in both pre-k and standards based reform--and in response to first National Education Goal: "by 2000 all children will start school ready to learn." The state universal pre-k movement further gained steam in early 2000s, and today state-funded pre-k programs enroll more than 1 million 3- and 4-year-olds nationally.

Full-day Kindergarten: As states invested resources in education reform, standards, and accountability, many prioritized full-day kindergarten investments. For example, more than half of funds from Pennsylvania's Accountability Block Grant support full-day-kindergarten. Since 1994, the percentage of children enrolled in full-day, as opposed to half-day, kindergarten has risen from under half to roughly two-thirds.

Reading Instruction: Since the mid-1990s, we have invested significant resources in improving reading instruction at the early elementary level. The National Reading Panel, which was established in 1997 and released its final report in 2000, established a new national consensus around how to effectively teach young children to read. The Reading Excellence Act, passed in 1998, and No Child Left Behind's Reading First program, which replaced REA in 2002, affirmed that consensus and have provided billions of dollars in federal funds to help states and school districts implement sound reading instruction in the early grades.

Smaller Class Sizes: Since the mid-1990s, states, school districts, and even the federal government have invested significant resources to reduce class size in the early elementary grades, in response to research linking smaller class sizes to improved student outcomes. Although some of these initiatives have been revised, and further research has refined our understanding of the connection between class size and student achievement, we are still spending more today to educate young children in smaller classes than we did a decade or more ago. Between 1993 and 2003, the average elementary school class size in the United States fell from 24 to 20.

These are significant reforms, and they all grow out of the standards-based reform movement sparked by Nation at Risk. Moreover, these and other reforms at the early childhood and early elementary education levels appear to be producing results: Since the mid-1990s 4th grade scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading and math have been on a steady upward trajectory. On the most recent long-term trend NAEP assessment, administered in 2004, 9-year-olds performed better in both reading and math than at any time since the assessment was first administered in 1971! That's a striking contrast to the middle and high school levels, where student achievement has stagnated and even declined.

Yet, even if the past 20+ years of education reform efforts have had their greatest success at the early education level (and we would argue that they have), that doesn't mean they've been anywhere near successful enough. Consider: Despite dramatic improvements, only 33 percent of fourth-graders were proficient in reading on the 2007 NAEP assessment, and only 39 percent were proficient in math. Moreover, the failure of elementary achievement gains to translate into better middle- and high-school achievement shows how far we continue to fall short in equipping our young students for the next level of their education. In other words: There's a lot more left to do in reforming early education.

For all their beneficial impacts, most of the early education reforms of the past two decades have been around the margins--adding a year of schooling prior to elementary school, lengthening the school day. All of these reforms are improvements, but they're about doing more of the same and getting marginal returns--not fundamentally improving the core of the early learning experience. (Improvements in reading instruction do get closer to this core, but, as research from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation demonstrates, too many schools are still not really implementing read curricula informed by the evidence).

To get the results we want, we need to dramatically improve the core of the learning experience--the curriculum and concepts to which children are exposed, the quality of instructional interactions between teachers and children in the classroom, and the alignment between curriculum, instructional strategies, evaluation and teacher training.

Right now we're a long way from where we need to be on all these factors. State content standards in the early elementary grades are woefully inadequate, and 9 states either have no literacy and numeracy standards at all in grades K-2, or had chosen to "cluster" their K-2 standards in one, largely useless, set of standards for the entire K-2 grade range. The early elementary curriculum remains woefully devoid of content. In-depth observational studies of early elementary classrooms find that the typical American elementary school classroom offers low levels of instructional support for students' learning. And the "egg carton" structure of many public schools leads to little alignment even among same-grade class rooms--let alone across grade levels.

Changing these conditions will be incredibly difficult. But it's essential to dramatically improving early education outcomes and getting the results we want at the elementary, middle and high school levels. And the body of research that can help us address these challenges--as well as new tools based on that research--is growing rapidly. The success of the next 25 years of early education reform will depend on the extent to which we can employ that research to move beyond the margins and radically improve the core of children's early education experiences.

A Call for Clarity in Early Elementary Standards

Sara Mead — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:37:00 -0400

The spring issue of AFT's American Educator makes the case for clear, specific content standards--and it should be must reading for anyone interested in improving early elementary education or PK-3 alignment. Clear, specific content standards are the cornerstone of an aligned PK-3 early learning experience. But, unfortuantely, too many states lack strong content standards in the early grades.

We're used to hearing the case for strong standards made in terms of equity--children in Detroit or Hampton Rhoads need to master the same knoweldge and skills as children in Ann Arbor or Fairfax. But good strandards should play an equally important role in aligning curriculum, assessment, and professional development within and across grades.

In an aligned PK-3 program, what children learn each year build seemlessly on what they learned the year before. But that's impossible without clearly articulated, detailed expectations for what children should learn each year: If we don't know in detail what children learned in second grade, it's hard to ensure that the third grade curriculum builds seamlessly from that; and if we don't know what children are expected to learn in third grade, then it's hard to design a second grade curriculum to prepare them for the next grade. If teachers don't know what children learned the previous year, they may repeat content or concepts that children already learned, or they might try to teach content that requires background knowledge children haven't yet acquired.

Unfortunately, AFT's analysis of state content standards in four key content areas--reading/English language arts, math, science, and social studies--shows that too many state standards are woefully lacking. That's particularly true at the early elementary level. AFT found that 9 states either had no literacy and numeracy standards at all in grades K-2, or had chosen to "cluster" their K-2 standards--in other words, writing one set of standards for the entire K-2 grade range--thereby making them utterly useless as a tool to support PK-3 alignment. AFT's Heidi Glidden write further,

This is a serious problem that states must address because specific, coherent, grade-by grade standards at the early grades are essential to building students’ background knowledge and vocabulary... Knowledge-rich K-2 standards are especially vital for young children from low-income families who, on average, have been exposed to roughly 30 million fewer words than children from professional families—and whose “word and world knowledge” is, therefore, substantially less than that of their peers.

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. AFT suggests that states have failed to write grade-by-grade K-2 standards because these grades aren't subject to assessment, and states haven't seen the need to write standards for grades that aren't assessed. That's incredibly short-sighted, and reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of standards. Standards don't exist to serve assessments--assessments exist to ensure that students are actually being taught standards. And standards exist because there are specific things children need to learn at each grade level in order to be successful in the next one. Clear, specific grade-by-grade standards in the early years chart a pathway for children to achieve proficiency by third grade. They are not optional.

Glidden calls on states to address their weak content standards in the early grades. But Congress should not leave this critical issue to the discretion of states. National standards--including clear, specific content standards in the early grades--would be the most straightforward way to address the problem of weak state content standards. Short of that, Congress should include language in the NCLB reauthorization mandating clear, specific grade-by-grade content standards in at least literacy and math in all of grades K-8, not just grades 3-8 (and course standards in the high school years). As we continue to expand high-quality pre-k and full-day kindergarten programs, we must not jeopardize that investment with indifferent, vague, and clustered standards in the early elementary years.

Let’s Count: Boosting Math in PK-3

Christina Satkowski — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:54:00 -0400

The National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s (NMAP) new report on math instruction in America has drawn a lot of press attention. Of the dozens of recommendations outlined in the report one thing is abundantly clear: We need to focus more on building core math skills in the early grades PK-3.

We all know that American high school students are falling behind in math. American 15 year olds rank 25th in math among their peers in the 30 most industrialized nations, according to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). But another international study, the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), finds that the international math gap starts even earlier: Only 7 percent of U.S. fourth graders achieved the “advanced” level on TIMSS, compared to 38 percent in Singapore.

Improving PK-3 math instruction is critical to improving our standing in math. We all know that the early years lay an essential foundation of literacy skills that students must acquire to support later learning. But it’s also true that children need to master foundational math skills in the early grades in order to learn more complex math content—in particular, algebra—in middle and high school. Research shows that children who are exposed to a math-rich environment prior to entering school (both at home and in a pre-k classroom) are less likely to struggle with math in later grades. A 2006 study published in Developmental Psychology found that even trivial math talk to pre-schoolers (“you two go get your coats”, “put away four toys”) can boost a child's math skills.

To that end, the NMAP report makes four recommendations for PK-3 math instruction:

Focus curriculum around the goal of ensuring proficiency in whole number operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) by Grade 4, in order to put students on track to learn algebra by Grade 8.
Ensure that students come to school with a basic understanding of numbers and counting. Familiarity with counting and numbers lays a foundation for children to acquire additional math skills and knowledge. Achieving this requires better pre-school and pre-k math instruction, as well as more research on quality early childhood math instruction.
Equip pre-k and early elementary teachers with the skills and knowledge to to recognize their students’ math capabilities and teach them core concepts and content.
Increase use of “math specialists” at the elementary level who have specialized math teaching knowledge and can focus on coordinating math curricula across grade levels.

The panel’s recommendations affirm and the importance of aligned curriculum in grades PK-3. Providing aligned math curricula and instruction beginning in pre-k and continuing through the early elementary years is the best way to ensure that young students build essential math skills at an even, graduated pace that leads to proficiency in whole number operations by fourth grade. Aligning PK-3 math curricula can also help reduce and weed out repetition from grade to grade, which the report identified as one factor slowing children’s acquisition of math skills.

The panel also highlighted an urgent need to improve the math skills and knowledge of PK-3 teachers. Too many early educators are unaware of young children’s cognitive capacity to understand mathematical concepts, or are themselves uncomfortable with and poorly trained in math. We need more research on both how to better prepare elementary educators in math, as well as the instructional methods that work best for teaching early math.

The NMAP report is the highest-profile recommendation in recent years to cement the link between quality math instruction in the early grades and math literacy in high school and beyond. It reminds us all that when it comes to boosting student success, Early Ed counts.

Photo courtesy of flickr user Inkyhack, used under a Creative Commons License.

Scandal is Easy, Curriculum is Hard

Sara Mead — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:44:00 -0400

Sol Stern seems to be in a bomb-throwing mood lately. Earlier this year he set the school choice world abuzz with a City Journal piece arguing that “school choice isn’t enough,” because improving student performance demands better curriculum and instruction, too—a sentiment with which we couldn’t agree more, but one that alienated lots of Stern’s pro-voucher friends. Now Stern’s written a fiery report on the Reading First program for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock the past year—or who simply aren’t education policy junkies like we are: Reading First, created as part of the 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation, is a federal program that provides funding to states and school districts to support early elementary reading programs grounded in “scientifically-based reading research” (SBRR). As defined under NCLB, SBRR programs must include explicit instruction the five components of effective reading instruction—phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, reading fluency, and reading comprehension strategies—identified by the National Reading Panel. Last year the program came under intense media and Congressional scrutiny following allegations of management problems and conflicts of interest on the peer review panels evaluating state Reading First applications.

Stern’s report seeks to offer the “other side” of the story—the one that didn’t get reported in the press but deserves to be heard. Stern argues that Reading First’s problems began even before the program was enacted, when Congressional drafters decided to not to require programs funded with Reading First dollars to be “scientifically proven”—ie, to have evidence from rigorous experimental trials that they improve children’s reading skills—as the program’s architects initially proposed. Instead, Congress adopted a “scientifically based” standard, which allowed programs to pass muster if they reflect scientific evidence on how children learn to read, but did not require the programs themselves to have undergone experimental evaluations. It did so because only two reading curricula—Direct Instruction and Success for All—met the “scientifically proven” standard (since then, the Reading Recovery program has also met this standard). Stern argues that this “softer” standard made problems inevitable, because it required the Reading First program office to apply discretion in determining whether or not programs were scientifically based, and created an opening for purveyors of ineffective curricula to attempt to label their wares.

There’s plenty to take issue with in Stern’s report—In particular his attacks on the Education Department’s Office of Inspector General and House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller for performing the oversight functions that are a part of their jobs. Stern and Fordham are clearly and, to their credit, forthrightly aligned with one pole of the ongoing wars over curriculum and pedagogical approaches. And their defense of Reading First director Christopher Doherty may be too personal to gain credibility beyond their immediate sphere.

Smart readers should look at the evidence and judge for themselves. But no matter what you think of its overall approach, Stern’s report illustrates several important points: First, it remains extremely rare for Congress to tie federal funding to requirements that funded programs show evidence of effectiveness—in part because there’s often too little research to guide key policy or instructional decisions, but also because some educators resist research-based practices. Second, much as we want to believe that the National Reading Panel report brought peace to the Reading Wars, they continue to rage, especially in education schools and at the local level. Third, the appearance of scandal in bureaucratic and process terms is much more salacious, and easy to write about, than the complexities of curriculum or scientifically based research.

Most important, while Reading First is still a relatively new program, all evaluations to date—by the Office of Management and Budget, the General Accounting Office, and even the liberal Center on Education Policy—suggest that Reading First is working, that it’s helping disadvantaged kids learn to read. And Congress’ response to last year’s scandals—slicing Reading First funding by nearly two-thirds—ultimately hurts these kids, not the people responsible for the programs’ problems.

The Bush administration’s fiscal year 2009 budget proposal requests a restoration of $1 billion in funding for Reading First, and recounts the steps the administration has taken to address program management issues identified by the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General. We believe that Congress should not only return Reading First funding to its previous levels, but should also expand the program to support scientifically based reading instruction in pre-k, as well as grades k-3. Perhaps increasing availability of Reading First funding for pre-k youngsters could even be part of a compromise to restore Reading First funding.

Ultimately, however, the Reading First controversy raises important questions for the broader debate about the federal role in setting standards and improving instruction. There’s something cart-before-the-horse about the feds advancing a national definition of quality reading programs when we don’t even have national standards for what children should know and be able to do in reading. That’s not a criticism of Reading First, but it does suggest we need to think beyond Reading First. There are two ways to respond to issues raised by the Reading First controversy: One is to advocate that the federal government remove itself entirely from trying to improve the quality of standards, curricula, or instructional approaches in public schools, and leave these issues entirely in the hands of states and local school districts. The other is to support an unprecedentedly stronger federal role in setting national standards and supporting effective curricula. We're on record in supporting rigorous national academic standards to address the disparities in expectations for children in different states under the current system. It's increasingly looking like NCLB won't be reauthorized until we have a new Congress and President--these are questions they'll have to take up then.

When Are Standards Sub-Standard?

Sara Mead — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 01:30:00 -0500

Texas is currently in the process of revisiting its "Pre-kindergarten Curriculum Guidelines"--a name that's something of a misnomer, because the guidelines are really more like a set of standards for what prekindergarteners should know and be able to do, as opposed to specifying a detailed curriculum. Vanessa, a Texas pre-kindergarten teacher who blogs at Inside Pre-k, thinks this revision is well overdue, because the current guidelines are insufficiently ambitious in their expectations for pre-kindergarteners' learning.

Vanessa's comments raise an important point. It's not enough for states simply to have standards for what young children should know and be able to do. Pre-k standards must also be aligned with K-12 standards --and both pre-k and K-12 standards must be sufficiently rigorous.

Unfortunately, elementary school standards themselves are too low in many states. A recent study by researchers from the Northwest Evaluation Association, published by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, finds the bar for third grade proficiency in many states is much lower than it is for eighth graders. In other words, children who score "proficient" on third grade assessments are not really on track to meet eighth grade proficiency standards when they get to eighth grade. As a result, parents, teachers and policymakers may believe elementary school students are doing better than is actually the case.

Texas is a particular culprit here: If Texas set its proficiency standards for third grade at a level that put children on track towards proficiency in eighth grade, the share of Texas third graders scoring proficient on state reading assessments would fall by 20 percentage points, and the percentage of Texas third graders proficient in math would fall by 11 percentage points. If Texas is setting the bar too low for its third graders, it shouldn't surprise us if the bar for pre-k is low as well.

We at Early Ed Watch often emphasize the need for PK-3 alignment. But PK-3 alignment is only a first step: Third grade standards need to be aligned with standards for later grades, and so on--and everything needs to lead up to a final goal of ensuring students leave public education with the skills to succeed in college or the workforce. Aligning early learning to too-low elementary school standards defeats the purpose.

Texas, at least, is thinking about alignment. Its Pre-Kindergarten Curriculum Guidelines are intended to "provide a means to align the prekindergarten programs with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)." That's an important step towards PK-3, and ultimately P-16, alignment. But Texas still has some work to do on that score.

Forgetting Our History

Sara Mead — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Happy President’s Day! On a day that honors our nation’s history, it’s fitting to take a moment to consider how we’re passing that history down to our youngest students. When we think about the skills and knowledge children need to master in PK-3, our minds tend to go first to language and literacy--with good reason, because language and literacy are gateway skills that open to door for children to master further learning, and these are critical years for language and literacy. We also tend to think about social and emotional development and, sometimes, mathematics.

But that doesn’t mean PK-3 education should neglect children’s learning in the content areas--including history. As E.D. Hirsch argues persuasively in The Knowledge Deficit literacy isn’t simply a matter of accurately decoding text--to be truly proficient readers, children need to develop an extensive vocabulary and content knowledge, in order to understand what they’re reading and place it in the framework of what they already know. That means that elementary school students need to become familiar with basic content in science, history, geography, and so on.

Unfortunately, American public education has a poor record of teaching history to early elementary school students. Historian Dianne Ravitch writes,

“The social studies curriculum for the K-3 grades is organized around the study of the relationships within the home, school, neighborhood, and local community. This curriculum of "me, my family, my school, my community" now dominates the early grades in American public education. It contains no mythology, legends, biographies, hero tales, or great events in the life of this nation or any other. It is tot sociology.”

When elementary schools do teach history to children in the early grades, it tends to be in a scattershot “heroes and holidays” approach on occasions like Thanksgiving and President’s Day--rather than a concerted effort to introduce elementary students to an aligned history curriculum that builds knowledge on knowledge throughout the early years. And some schools are downplaying history and social studies content altogether in order to focus more time on literacy and math skills.

The result--only 17 percent of American fourth-graders are proficient in history, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP--otherwise known as The Nation’s Report Card).

We can--and must--do better than this. Developing foundational literacy, math, and social and emotional skills is an essential goal of PK-3 early education, but mastery in these areas needn’t come at the expense of instruction in history, science, and other core content areas. These topics can be integrated into literacy and math instruction--for example, reading selections that build literacy skills can also emphasize history content. Aligned PK-3 curricula can also help ensure that the activities that help children develop literacy and math skills also expose children to a wide range of history and science content. In Building Blocks, Gene Maeroff profiles schools that are doing a good job integrating content knowledge into the early elementary curriculum.

Too many children--and adults--know President's Day and Martin Luther King Day, which we celebrated a few weeks ago, as little more than a day off work, and an excuse for furniture stores and used car dealers to advertise huge sales. That's a problem, and one for which the solution needs to start in PK-3.