Standards

Last week the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and National Governors’ Association (NGA)—the two organizations leading efforts to develop “common core” state standards—released a first draft of their “college- and career-ready” standards. The overall reaction from education groups, policy wonks, and other observers has been pretty positive so far, although some critics say the standards devote too little attention to specific content knowledge.

We've previously written about both presidential candidates' unwillingness to talk about No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  That's changed a bit - especially since the Teacher's College debate between Obama spokesperson Linda Darling-Hammond and McCain advisor Lisa Graham Keegan brought it back into the public eye.  Regardless, it's impossible to deny that whoever wins the election will have to tackle NCLB head-on.  It's not going to be an easy battle.

Reauthorizing NCLB will likely be a long process that demands the next President's leadership and guidance.  The list of topics that is likely to make or break the reauthorization process is extensive and overwhelming.  But in honor of this Election Day, we have selected a few that are near and dear to our hearts for the future President-elect to look forward to.

Today on the Diane Rehm Show, Obama spokesperson Melody Barnes mentioned that if elected, Barack Obama would like to consider portfolios as a form of NCLB assessment.  This news is both surprising and timely - yesterday the Forum for Education and Democracy held an event focusing on the benefits of performance based assessments (PBAs) in a standards-based and accountability-focused world.

Like portfolios, performance based assessments ask students to demonstrate their learning through open ended prompts, projects, presentations, and papers rather than in the multiple choice format commonly found in today's K-12 accountability system.  A few states and localities like Rhode Island and the New York Performance Standards Consortium have implemented such systems with some success.

Now that Republican and Democratic presidential candidates Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama have both released their education agendas, Ed Money Watch has decided to examine the federal education funding implications of both plans. While both candidates' plans leave some questions unanswered, the differences between them on education funding are stark.

Sen. Obama's platform would increase federal funding for K-12 and early education programs by $18 billion annually. The largest share of that new funding-$10 billion-would go to Obama's "zero to five" early education plan to improve the quality and availability of childcare, preschool, and Head Start programs. Obama's proposal would more than double the current federal investment in early childhood programs such as Head Start and the Child Development Block Grant.

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.

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,