Debating Standards

Over the next few weeks, Indiana parents will receive copies of rewritten academic standards for language arts and math. Anyone who cares about education should read these standards carefully and send their comments to the State Department of Education.

The purpose of the standards is to spell out what children should know and be able to do at their grade level. The standards are intended to drive curriculum decisions and are to be the basis for questions on the annual ISTEP test.

The newest documents are a huge improvement over what we've had, but still fall short in many ways. An education roundtable created by the 1999 legislature and Gov. Frank O'Bannon will be reviewing the standards in coming months and needs the commonsense input of parents and teachers.

YOU NEED NOT BE A LICENSED EDUCATOR TO COMMENT ON THESE STANDARDS. It is a common tactic of the education establishment to dismiss criticism from lay folks who don't have a teaching certificate or an Ed.D. at the end of their names. Considering the almost unintelligible standards we've had to date, it's about time we heard from the people helping the kids with homework at night. You may read and comment on the standards online at: http://www.doe.state.in.us/standards.

Indiana has had proficiency standards in place for more than seven years, but they've received poor grades from national groups because they don't specify what skills a child needs at specific grade levels. The new edition is organized by content area and by grade. New versions are also being prepared for science and social studies.

Another criticism of our old standards was the way they were written—so filled with educational jargon that no one could understand them. More often than not, they sat gathering dust on school building shelves.

The Department of Education has taken a big step forward by addressing these weaknesses. For example, in first grade language arts, there's a section on word recognition that acknowledges the need to use phonic skills to recognize, understand, and pronounce common words, to blend sounds and break down words into parts. Our previous standard on reading said children should be able to use "meaning cues to construct meaning," and largely dismissed the value of decoding or sounding out skills.

"Nothing else matters if our schools fail to teach children how to read well," says Anita Holten, a retired first grade teacher from South Bend, who sees some progress in the new language. She believes the final standards should be based on "validated, documented research" about how children learn. In the case of reading, she says, research shows intensive, systematic phonics works for the majority of children.

That same approach must be used in math. What works best for most children? The rewritten standards, for example, suggest calculators be used in kindergarten. Is that validated by research? Or does the research support the Japanese approach, which is to delay introduction of calculators until the middle grades?

The Department of Education is seeking counsel from Achieve Inc. and the International Center for Leadership, which have been asked to compare our standards to the best in the world. That is a good idea.

The result of this initiative must be a final set of standards that are clear, educationally sound and present a small but essential core of knowledge and skills that students need. Otherwise, they're better left on the shelves.

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