Sorry sorry sorry!

Hey, quality over quantity, right? right? right?

Maybe not, I fell behind, but here's the standards blog you've probably been waiting ever so patiently for.

Being a philosophy major has taught me at least one thing (maybe only one thing), and that is in order to must effectively create a philosophy, you must start at the beginning; you cannot leave any considerations out and you have to explain every point you make.

That's why I think most people on both sides of the issue are so often tricked by standards.

On one side of the argument there's a group that doesn't think there should be any standards. They point to things like teacher independence, private school success, charter school success, teaching to tests, when truth be told, none of these things have much to do with why standards are necessary. Then there's those in favor. They start telling you, how do we know teachers are doing a good job? How can all the students get a fair education without standards? And how do we effectively pick the best if it's not all the same across the board? And those things have more to do with a standardized curriculum than standards (which I'll get to towards the end).

But why are standards necessary, if at all?

Glad you asked. Standards aren't necessary to monitor teachers, they're not necessary because you need to compare students to one another, they're necessary because you need to be certain that public schools are providing an education of any sort. And honestly, they should be minimal. They shouldn't interfere with teacher independence, they shouldn't require teachers to teach to tests, and they shouldn't overwhelm students. What they should do is minimally ensure that schools are doing a job. They should make sure that by fourth grade a student knows who Abraham Lincoln is and maybe some knowledge about him. Point being, there has to be a barometer for parents and students to feel that their education is worth something.

But Chris, private schools and charter schools don't have standards!

Yeah, they do. Their just independently set and not always clear. Private schools promise an elite education, and point to their results. We send x number of kids to Ivy League schools, y number of kids become lawyers, etc. Their standards are their own guarantees to  their paying customers that their child is in good hands. As for charter schools the same rules apply. And all they have to say is we're going to be better than a public school!

And because of the nature of public schools and how they're funded. The standards set for them has to be at an educational level, because public schools can't promise Ivy League, they have to promise the opportunity for students to attain the education that will allow them to get in an Ivy League school.

The fact still remains that this should be done minimally! Their should be a ton of room for teacher independence, student choice and local learning.

Now, I'm about to offer a simple solution to a complex problem, but the reason I'm offering it well aware of that fact is because I would leave curriculum assigned to each standard to those who are more knowledgeable than myself.

At Smithtown High School West, we started school at 7:20am and the day ended at 1:55. That's six 1/2 hours, if you take away lunch and period breaks you're left with about 5 1/2 hours in a school day where a student is in class and learning. Now imagine this, in that 5 1/2 hours, you get 2 and 1/2 hours of national curriculum, 1 and 1/2 of state/county decided curriculum, and an hours of student choice. This isn't to say each individual class would fall under one, it could fall under all three. Take social studies for example, the teacher could start of the day with a lesson on the American Revolution (federal) move towards the impact it's had locally (state/county), and then assign a student to find one fact about the Revolution that they find interesting (choice). Or they could split it up through out the week or even the year. this way teachers could run their classrooms how they want, teaching the subjects they're supposed to while giving students the opportunity to learn independently.

But how would we know the students would be being taught each thing for sure, without having someone in the classroom? How would we know the standards are always being accomplished?

First, the whole "self answering questions thing" is really overplayed so I'm gonna go ahead and make that my last one. But, for now I'll consider those questions to be of the "teacher evaluation variety" and put them off until a later date.