Standards

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,