Over the next month, a group of 24 teachers, school administrators, school board members, education experts and others will comb through each of Maine’s academic standards for math and English language arts. Of each standard, they’ll ask: Is it clear, and is it rigorous? They’ll mark yes or no (“1” or “0,” to be precise), perhaps elaborate on their reasoning and suggest changes, then move on to the next standard.
Academic standards lay out what students are expected to know and be able to do in a particular subject area at each grade level. The standards up for review by the 24-member panel are the Common Core state standards that Maine and 42 other states have adopted as their own and that have recently generated so much controversy, largely in Republican circles.
Maine adopted the standards in 2011 amid little controversy, and the pushback here has been more limited than it has in other states led by Republican governors. Maine’s schools have now fully implemented the expectations, which are clearer and more rigorous than the standards they replaced. Teachers across the state have worked to familiarize themselves with and craft lessons based on them.
Now, a year after schools fully incorporated the standards into their everyday work, the Department of Education-appointed panel will review them, potentially with an eye toward changing them. Department staff could incorporate the group’s recommendations into a standards revision they expect to propose to the Legislature this winter.
The result could be simply minor tweaks (perhaps the group will decide it’s not clear or rigorous to expect a fifth-grader to “[w]rite opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons and information” — a fifth-grade writing standard). Or the result could be an affirmation that the standards as written are already clear and rigorous and that no changes are needed.
Either way, devoting time and resources to a review of academic standards at this point unnecessarily sows the seeds of uncertainty among teachers who are constantly adjusting to new education initiatives.
Maine’s academic standards themselves have changed three times since 2007 — that’s almost once every two years. The new academic standards deserve a chance to work. Besides, the standards themselves are not the most important focus area right now.
A number of changes in Maine schools that are taking effect in the coming years build on the standards. By 2017, students who graduate from Maine high schools will earn a diploma only if they can demonstrate they’ve mastered each of the state’s academic standards. Starting next year, teachers’ job performance will be judged in part on their students’ standards mastery. And this spring, Maine students will have their first go at a new standardized test that will specifically test their grasp of the Common Core standards.
Those initiatives deserve significant attention, not to mention efforts to help teachers use the Common Core standards to improve instruction and student learning. Keeping the debate focused on the standards themselves could undermine much of that work.
The Department of Education is right to say that educators need to be sure Maine has its standards right. But that process already happened in recent years as the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers solicited expert input and developed the standards, then Maine asked for public comments and adopted the standards.
The 24-member standards review panel is only meeting now as public skepticism about Common Core has swelled. The panel even includes two members of No Common Core Maine, a citizens’ group leading Common Core opposition in the state.
In one way, there could be a benefit to forcing Common Core opponents, proponents, experts and others into a room to review the individual standards. The group’s proceedings will force the opponents to specify their objections to each standard — “Partition shapes into parts with equal areas. Express the area of each part as a unit fraction of the whole,” a third-grade math standard, for example — rather than voice their more general objections to all of Common Core.
That redeeming benefit, however, isn’t worth the time and effort devoted to a debate that should already be settled.