ROCKPORT, Maine — The LePage administration and the Maine Department of Education have been advocating standards-based education in public schools.
So what does standards-based education actually look like?
Messalonskee High School math teacher Megan Childs has worked to integrate standards-based education in her classroom. In her class sessions, she organizes the desks in a U shape so everyone faces the board where she lectures. Everyone in the class starts with a math question that might resemble one on a standardized test. Then she begins her lecture.
Last year she might have seen some bored kids — the ones who already knew the math concept — zone out at this point. Now she sees them whip out their laptops.
“The kids who need my lecture listen and the kids who don’t need my lecture are listening to tutorials or reading ahead in the book,” Childs told a group of her peers at a conference Thursday at the Samoset Resort.
Childs keeps a website for her classes where she posts online lectures from Khan Academy — a free website with education videos. If a student is ahead, he or she may watch Khan Academy tutorials and work out of the textbook.
It wasn’t easy at first, she said. She has to constantly monitor each child’s progress.
“Some kids at first were trying to go ahead and couldn’t, so we had to talk about that. It requires constant check-ins. Sometimes you have to rein them back if they get too far ahead and aren’t really learning,” she said. “If I see a child who I know is at lecture-level with a laptop [out], I say, ‘un-uh. No. You’re with me.’ You need to know your kids.”
Standards-based education focuses on students achieving basic goals instead of grade levels and letter grades. When students achieve one goal, they move on to the next.
The standards-based system has worked particularly well for a couple of students, she said. One has been out sick for a long time, but because Childs posts all the lessons in a calendar online, the student can follow along with her coursework.
Another child didn’t like online learning. He is gifted in math but became disenchanted when asked to do online work to progress his skills. He was too young by normal school standards to be in Childs’ class, but the principal placed him there and asked her to get creative with him.
“This kid loves math, but he does not like being alone and he does not like being in front of a computer screen. Now he’s in this class where he challenges other kids and they challenge him. They get that interaction and when he needs to go ahead, he goes ahead. He was squelched last year but he’s enjoying math again.”
Standards-based education is designed to provide this flexibility, advocates say.
“We’ve been doing what we are doing for 120 years. We put a child in a box when he was 5. Then put him in another box when he was 6, another box when he was 7 — like a passenger in a car. A factory line. Move on whether you learned it or not,” said Don Siviski, the Maine Department of Education’s superintendent of instruction.
This, he said, means the students who don’t understand the concepts in class get frustrated and act out, creating discipline problems. The students who already know the concepts get bored and become disengaged in school.
Marisa Penney, a biology teacher at Massabesic High School, seemed skeptical about standards-based education at first.
Penney’s school district is implementing the system and she said it’s working well. But unlike math and English, where many students are at many different levels, Penney said it’s unlikely in science that the students know much of what she will teach ahead of time. For instance, she also offers the chance for her students to move at a faster pace than her lectures but for the most part that doesn’t happen.
So in Penney’s biology class, standards-based education mostly means allowing students to prove their knowledge in various ways.
At the beginning of each new topic, Penney goes over the learning goals and makes the students write the objectives in their own words. Then she lectures and conducts labs. To prove they know the material, each student gets a checklist.
At the conference Thursday, Penney pulled one a checklist that showed six different biology-related activities that students could pick from. It means the students have a choice; they don’t have to do the book work if they want to do another project to show they understand a concept, she said.
For Penney, grading is different in the standards-based system.
“If they chose to do a worksheet and it’s not 100 percent correct then they get it back and they need to fix it so I know they are getting the knowledge they need to and they show proficiency. Otherwise they won’t move on,” she said.
And what if they just don’t get the concept?
“If they spent too much time on a subject we talk about moving on for a while, but it’s an incomplete and we have to come back to it,” said Hope Herrick, an English teacher at Messalonskee High School.
Coming back to the concept might be during class time or after school. If the student is far behind his peers, he might be asked to attend summer school to catch up, Herrick said.
The conference Thursday brought in about 100 teachers, most from the midcoast. It was hosted by the Many Flags One Campus Foundation, which has the goal of putting a high school, vocational school and colleges in one building in the midcoast. Without state funding for the project yet, the nonprofit has been working to host educational forums in the area.
High school teachers lecturing???? Ah, the old junior professor syndrome…
Sounds like a great idea, but also sounds next to impossible to implement effectively.
Going to the moon was impossible in 1962. The technology is coming, we need to get ready. Check out “Inevitable,” co-written by Bea McGarvey (from the Portland area) http://masscustomizedlearning.com/
Read it and heard her speak. The book is nothing more than a marketing tool for her company and the content itself is ho-hum. She has many good talking points and good ideas that most people in education already know, BUT the problem is where is the money going to come from to fund this on a statewide level. Not from the state or the federal government, that’s for sure. Ultimately, it falls on local towns and districts who are already facing the task of cutting positions and budgets as it is.
How about Elementary and Middle Schools going to standards based learning and if the student doesn’t meet the standards, they don’t get passed along to the next grade. So many students show up at the doors of their local high schoosl without basic skills. This has been going on for years under the guise that the students self esteem will be damaged. Yeah, it is when they fail every class freshman year.The high school is blamed for having unreasonable standards. Education reform needs to start with the students entering kindergarten and not high school kids. In a lot of ways its way toooooo late.
You are absolutely correct. It starts at pre-school or kindergarten. You can’t build a house without a firm foundation and expect it to last. Children need that foundation.
Makes you wonder why LePage wants to eliminate Head Start funding.
I believe that Governor LePage is just following the orders of the Heritage Foundation and ALEC.
I work in schools, and I could not agree more. High schools get all the bad press for “not preparing” students for college or “the real world.” However, kids can do absolutely nothing from kindergarten through 8th grade and magically move on. They can miss 75 days of school, do no homework, blow off tests, and they just keep getting promoted. The overall pressure on K-8 in most places is much less (as they are not held nearly as accountable to the degree that they should).
Ever wonder why it seems 3/4ths of middle schoolers make honor roll? Because the grading is ridiculous. Make the parents feel great so they can put the stupid “my kid is an honor roll student at wherever middle school” on their minivan.
K-8 grading is more about keeping parents happy than it is about actually ensuring that kids are ready for the next grade.
With true reform there will be no need for grading.
Educational reform needs to start at home. Public schools can only provide equality of opportunity not equality of results. This reform is a joke. The only thing this will accomplish is to punish those students who take education seriously. Shame on Governor LePage and Commissioner Bowen for promoting an agenda like this that ignores individual responsibility and eliminates competition from our high schools.
There is no research that shows that competition improves learning.
In fact, there is evidence that competition actually decreases learning.http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/02/03/ranking-people-can-reduce-iq/
Show me evidence that completely eliminating competition from high schools will help students after they graduate.
Think of the hundreds of thousands of homeschoolers who have never experienced academic competition. They are doing incredible things after they graduate from high school and the large number of them who go on to college, the military or into a profession.
SOME do incredible things. Many “homeschoolers” are simply kids whose parents filed the paperwork with the state and do nothing with their children.
To someone not knowledgeable on this subject, it may seem like they are doing nothing. To those of us who understand child-led, student-centered, standard-based education, we realize that greatness comes out of the so-called nothingness.
I would say MOST do incredible things and that SOME homeschoolers are simply…
My experience is based on the parents who want to re-integrate their “homeschooled” children into schools after the homeschooling was a colossal failure..or in the words of the parents, “yeah, he really didn’t do much at home.”………no kidding.
Of course not every case is like that, but homeschooling is certainly not just people doing great things at home and having their children win national spelling bees either.
It is too easy to simply for a parent to “homeschool” in the eyes of the state.
You have bad teachers whether in public school or in home education.
Statistics have repeatedly shown that as a whole, homeschooled students are on par or further advanced academically than their public schooled peers. They do well at the college level and adapt very well to the “real” world because unlike their public school peers, they have not been locked away from society for 6+ hours a day, five days a week, 180+ days a year for 13 years. Instead they have mingled in the real world every day, interacting with people of all ages. As a result many are very mature and responsible.
My point was in reference to standards-based learning and not to defend or promote homeschooling. When done skillfully, standards-based education is the way to go. Institutionalized, one-size-fits all education is not working and has not been working for many years. One can learn and be successful without grade levels, grades, competition or special recognition.
Really? I would like to see research that supports this statement. I find that there are a lot of assumptions being made about homeschoolers without any evidence. Also, one could say the same about publicly schooled kids: Parents file the paperwork and have the schools babysit their children without any learning results…that, by the way, can be supported by test scores…
I would add that in addition to some great academic and professional achievements, homeschooled kids are by and large confident, happy, responsible adults, no matter what career path they choose. Life success is not all about finding the highest paying job or attending the most prestigious college.
THEY WON’T BE PRESSURED TO SUCCEED AT ALL COSTS, A.K.A. CHEAT!
I believe competition is healthy for all people, as long as the competition is on a level playing field and everyone plays by the rules. We have become so acustom to cheating in business, sports, relationships that it is only thought of as wrong if someone does it against us or if someone gets caught. If you don’t have to “WIN” at education, you don’t have to cheat. Children aren’t born with the inate ability to cheat, they are born with the inate ability to explore, question and test. This is called learning. It happens every waking moment and sometimes when we are sleeping. Everyone is always learning something. Only when we affix artificial scores to compare one student against all others instead of monitoring progress does the ugly spector of cheating rear its head. Whether it’s students, parents, teachers or administrators, the pressure of being compared to everyone else will cause some to cheat. Sometimes in small and sometimes in big ways.
Perhaps you can invite me to your planet one day, but on Earth all life, including human beings, are born with an inate ability to compete. We call this living.
We are born with an innate ability and desire to learn. One can be successful in life without school competition. In fact, if you remove some of the competition more students may apply themselves instead of feeling defeated before they even begin.
This is, if the world is defined by American standards which goes to show why U.S. education fails. If you take competition so seriously then how come the US fails when compared to other countries.? That, too, is what Americans are known for in other countries: Being utterly uneducated and self-absorbed with a self-confidence that lacks a sense of reality.
It’s not about competition…it’s about progressing in learning at their own pace in their own preferred learning style.
Just read “Finnish Lessons” from Pasi Salberg. Competetion is detrimental to learning results. Collaboration is needed. Improving education starts at the college level, when teachers are being educated. The U.S. has a long way to go to catch up with other leading Industrial countries.
Enabling them move at their own pace punishes those students that take education seriously? Seriously? Is “equality of opportunity” good enough? LePage and Bowen seem to be looking for some “results” from their investment.
At our school the results or rewards are this: if a student meets a measurement topic, he/she can reward themselves by getting more time at the gym OR moving on to the next topic. How many kids are going to choose the self-directed learning when there is an opportunity to go to the gym? A few, but not many. Test scores in our district have gone down since this was implemented. But that’s ok, because WaldoTeacher likes the independence it gives her. Seriously? Seriously??
Standardized test scores may go down but that is because teachers in these settings are no longer spending all of their time teaching to the test. Test scores may go down but students portfolios grow in size and quality. I hope for the day when standardized testing no longer exists.
The question here is: Why do the kids prefer the gym? Don’t they have enough time at recess? Is studying so boring that they don’t want to stay? How does teaching have to change to accommodate the students’ need to move and to learn.
Educators and parents are being asked to be creative. Students learn better when they enjoy learning. we have known that for centuries.
This system pretends to be about moving students at their own pace. Instead, it is “seriously” about lowering the common denominater. The only result this is going to produce is a future weakening of our country. God help us all.
The present system is perfectly suited to getting the results we’ve been getting. How’s that working? Should we just speed up the assembly-line? Everyone with more than one kid knows that different kids learn differently. We’ve got to stop pretending otherwise and redesign how we do things.
So creating a system with worse results is the answer? We need to stop pretending that the failures of our school system are the failures of the current model. Our current model has worked well, works well, and will continue to work well for children and families who value education.
not likely
Please wake up and look around you and the world! The education system doesn’t work well for anybody. Parents, kids, teachers and society. Even LePage agrees with that.
This isn’t equality of opportunity as much as it is training equality of results.
This approach works very well. Children take learning seriously when they have the freedom to explore and when there is connection to their lives. They take it seriously when they can work at their own pace and when they can delve into the areas that interest them or that they excel at.
The system we have now is so artificial that students burn out fairly young.
School isn’t about competition, it is about learning. It is better to teach students how to collaborate and work together successfully than to have them in constant competition.
If only life were as beautiful as you think our schools should be.
Everyone should want the best for our schools and for them to be a beautiful place to learn.
Unfortunately, most of us need to live in reality.
So you think our educational system is a lost cause and true reforms are pointless? You don’t think that children have an inborn desire to learn and that our present system does all that it can to squelch that desire?
Your reality sounds pretty depressing. I prefer to have hope and belief that there is a better way.
When we know better, we should do better. We know the system is not working, we should change it.
You are right, my reality is pretty depressing. I have a child in a school system that has implemented these “reforms.” Make changes? Fine, I am OK with legitimate improvements. But these changes make things worse, not better. No thanks.
I think it’s the parents who have the most problem with educational reform. There would be few students who would chose the present form of education over a standards-based education if given the chance to experience both.
Many parents live through their children and need their child to get special recognition in order for them to feel good about themselves. Without grades and honor roll, these parents don’t know what to do with themselves.
This is all a process. The switch from our present institutionalized education system to these cutting edge approaches need several years to evolve and to reach their full potential. For parents and teachers stuck in tradition and nostalgia, this will be a difficult transition. Some may be so stuck in tradition that they remove their children from these schools and put them back into institutionalized education settings.
The long-term results will show that these type of changes will generate well-educated adults.
In our school, the students have a lot more time to play video games. In our school, students have an incentive to turn in sub-par assignments the first time, because they know they will be given multiple opportunities to make teacher-suggested corrections. No doubt many students would choose the easy way out that these performance-based “reforms” offer. Real cutting edge. Sorry, I do not share your faith in the promise of future results.
Of course! It’s the parents! What do they know about their children?
Maybe you should consider to homeschool.
So….life is ugly and hence, we need to learn how to compete? Is this your approach to learning and motivating young people? Is this your recipe to move the U.S. ahead in the world? Seriously?
It makes me think of how our excellent university system is run. You have some core courses that most colleges require, but then students focus on what they are interested in, achieving the objectives (courses) required for their degree.
Oh boy….yep, everybody gets a prize…….then when they hit the real world, tell me what happens again?………never mind, I know the answer.
Yes, “freedom to explore.”…….like “my kid doesn’t like math so just let him/her draw during that class.
No one gets prizes. There is no need for prizes as there is now. There is no need to stroke the egos of some, while making others feel inept.
The satisfaction comes from having the space and time to learn at their own pace, to advance in subjects where one excels, while having time to master those areas of difficulty. Learning becomes a joy so they don’t need to be bribed and rewarded.
In the real world we don’t get grades, we get evaluated by how well we meet the expectations (standards) set by our employers. Mastery of skills and meeting employer expectations are essential elements in the workplace. When we enter the adult world, many things go by without recognition or even praise. It’s the ones who have been saturated by rewards in school who often have a hard transition into the “real” world where they no longer are in the lime light.
In the real world we interact with people of all ages. I have never had a job where everyone was the same age. Allowing children to learn how to work with students of all ages will better equip them to function in the real world. Keeping students locked away from society with same-age students where everyone follows the same path is not duplicated anywhere in the real world.
In many cases, standards-based education integrates all subjects into the learning experience so there isn’t necessarily a “math class” or a “reading class” because throughout the course of exploration many subjects are woven together.
The focus now in math is on a conceptual understanding rather than rote memorization. The students learn the thinking behind the steps in computation and understanding. Now many students know the steps but don’t understand why they are doing the steps. They can recite the steps without a deep understanding at the conceptual level. In reading there is a focus on comprehension and finding deeper meaning. Rather than trying to get an A on a test or to make the honor roll the students concentrate on progress and mastery of skills not associated with artificial grading.
Or… could our high schools be failing our kids, as they shuffle from class to class, with teachers trying to motivate them with obsolete, percentage-based, average everything at the end of the quarter grading systems, “I’ll give you a zero!” “OK, Whatever…”
With this approach there is no next grade because there are no grades.
Very valid points
Will the paper do any follow up that also includes the question answer session with the public?
Perhaps this system would be effective somewhere where there was buy-in from the community up-front, unlike the implementation at RSU2. At our school system, it was dictated by the former superintendent, who is now working for Commissioner Bowen. Some families are leaving the school system as result of how this was been implemented and how it has divided the community. While some teachers and parents are comfortable with it, most are not, but those who speak out against it are marginalized. Students are confused as it is being implemented inconsistently – the grading system has changed for each of the last three years, and there was no honor roll at this high school this year. We have terrific teachers here and the parents are very supportive of the teachers, but the administration has created an environment of fear. I hope that when this is forced on other school systems, the implementation will be done in a far more inclusive, effective manner.
I agree that parents need to be informed as to the intent of the change in educational structures, and that their input should be crucial to how the school functions.
I think that with standards-based education, things such as letter grades and honor rolls will become obsolete. This may be upsetting to parents and students who thrive upon official recognition of their skills. But in the long run, moving to a system where all students actually learn and master skills and each student is allowed to do so at his own pace will lead to students with better self esteem. True self esteem does not come from having others praise you for your accomplishments–it comes from accomplishing things that you are proud of.
Excellent post.
My kids are sleeping through a week of garbage standardized testing this week – they’re learning nothing. Next fall they will be skipping the NECAP’s and we’ll be heading to a beach for the week. That being said, there is a great need for meaningful teacher review and evaluation – we need a system in place to weed out the bad teachers and motivate the marginal ones.
as opposed to bad parents who allow their child to skip a week of school because the parent doesn’t see the importance of some testing. NECAPS and NWEAs give a lot of very helpful and accurate information (and parents who have kids “who just don’t test well” hate to admit that).
These tests give no helpful or accurate information.Standardized testing is a scam. One of the big money makers in this country. There is a money trail between testing companies and textbook companies.
Portfolio and skills assessments give helpful and accurate information.
Hats off to this parent. The more parents who do this, the sooner we can get standardized testing out of our schools.
This standards based system will INCREASE the assessments
in school. Maine’s former Commissioner
of Education is the policy advisor for the Smarter Balanced Assessment. This will replace the NECAP and SAT in 2014. The rumor is that per pupil cost to
administer this assessment will be very high.
The Smarter Balanced Test will have summative
and interim assessments. This means test taking all year long!
Also, the Maine DOE is changing all of the variables
at the same time (instruction methods and tests are both changing). Parents won’t be able to evaluate test
results before or after standards-based instruction. How convenient. There will no longer be any “norm referenced”
tests, because the Smarter Balanced Test is adaptive. No two students take the same test. Accountability for schools now means moving
students forward on a linear list of standards, at a varied pace. “Pace” will replace “grades.” The reward for motivated students is early
graduation. I personally don’t want my
14 year old sent off to community college with a bunch of 20 year olds. Parents will need to worry about “pace.”
The last consultants to push ED reform in the
state convinced everyone to purchase “extreme spiraling curricula.” It’s no surprise that students didn’t master skills.
The new consultants (some of them the same players) are now pushing
standards-based instruction, which is extremely “linear”. I feel that standards-based instruction
swings too far in the opposite direction.
We need to fix schools, but we don’t need to turn the system upside down
to do so. Of course, this will keep the
consultants busy with lots of work over the next decade!
I bet parents telling their kids to just zone out for a week is real helpful. Let me guess, the teacher reviews should be tied to the students’ performances on these tests?
What about bad parents who let their kids skip school for a week to go to the beach because they would be testing otherwise. Consider yourself a weed.
Oh please…no need to blame and accuse. Did you get the point? What tells you that taking your child to the beach can not be educational?
I applaud you for skipping the tests. I think if every parent followed that lead, our education system would be forced to change at a much faster level. The State of Maine could make the decision to stop all standardized testing and move to a different approach…it would take guts and commitment though.
But what could they do if the kids simply didn’t show up for testing anymore?
One year when I taught at New Sweden School 20 years ago, and for many teachers there for years before that, I had 5 math groups, plus one young lady doing high-school level Geometry in a class of about 24 (grades 7-8 in one room). Laptops did not exist – not just they weren’t in schools, they didn’t exist *at all*.
This idea that kids are stuck in boxes based on age – and who’s fault is that, since kids can’t legally enter school in Maine if their 5th birthday falls after 10/15 – and march lock-step forward is absurd. Good teachers in good schools have been “knowing their kids” and making accomodations for centuries.
My concern is for the children who have been passed along without acquiring base skills, but will now be subject to standardized testing. Will we be able to accommodate them and help them through the transition. Put the blame and bickering between community members, teachers and parents aside and lets figure out how to make sure our children (even the rural ones without internet) are successful with their education.
This is an interesting concept. I’m interested to hear everyone’s thoughts. It sounds like a plan that might actually work. My children are both grown now, but when they were in school, I remember their algebra teacher telling me how difficult it was to try to stimulate some of the kids in the class while trying to get others caught up on the materials. This just might be a solution.
Nancy Carlsson Paige has a PhD in Education , has been teaching teachers for over 20 years
and also happens to be the mom of actor Matt Damon.
google her name with the words standards based education
nancy carlsson paige standards based education