Real Talk
Since the days of the one-room schoolhouse, the American education system has been ordered by grades with students expected to learn the same set of skills and within the same scope of knowledge for their grade level. In many ways, this makes sense. The difference now is the standards for each grade may or may not be developmentally appropriate. Unfortunately, the pressure to meet those standards, as assessed by high-stakes testing, often guides classroom instruction.
So all-important are grade-level standards that even during the Pandemic, when every student in America was in danger of “falling behind,” rather than temporarily adjusting the standards to meet the needs and circumstances of our students, the entire education system was thrown into panic mode, heaping unmanageable expectations and unnecessary stress on teachers and kids.
Now that it has been five years and the panic has subsided, maybe it’s time to look at the urgency placed on grade-level standards more critically. Is strict adherence to standards in the best interest of students?
Standards: What kids need to succeed?
Standards describe a set of skills every student should have at each grade level. The goal of these standards is to help students have what they need to succeed in college or the workforce. While ensuring students become employable and college-ready is important, seeing these as the primary goals of education puts the educational cart before the horse. In other words, being employable or ready for college should be the byproduct of a good education–not the point of it. By making standards the primary measure of success, schools have reduced students to products and education to a checklist. When we are forced to stick to the standards, regardless of circumstances or individual needs, the standards and the assessment of those standards become the goal–not the education and development of the child.
This is especially problematic in the younger grades. For example, there is a huge difference between what is academically appropriate for a child who is developmentally 4.6 years old and one who is developmentally 6.6 years old–both of which would be in the normal range for a kindergartener. By educating young children in a cookie-cutter fashion to make them employable down the road, we run the risk of rushing them past some important skills and experiences that they need to be successful in school and the workplace but also as human beings.
Learning games and fun lessons are not the same as play-based learning. Children often gain skills like sharing, patience, creativity, and emotional regulation through free play. Unfortunately, many schools have sacrificed free play to meet the standards.
By whose standards?
Academic standards are determined by the states, usually the State Board of Education. This doesn’t mean the federal government does not influence state standards. In 1983, a U.S. Department of Education commission published A Nation At Risk which sounded the alarm about the state of public education and launched the standards-based reform movement. From No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act to the Race to the Top Act, standards-based reforms have been implemented throughout history. Their goals have been to improve academic performance and overcome disparities in the educational experience of disadvantaged and minority children.
While these seem like admirable goals, standard-based education often bumps up against individual students’ needs and classroom teachers’ day-to-day experience. The reality is that not all children in any given grade learn at the same pace or are ready for the same academic challenges at the same time. In theory, standards-based education ensures an equitable education for students no matter where they attend school. In reality, it often means trying to push pegs of various shapes and sizes into one standards-based hole.
The dangers of too much too soon
Moving away from standards-based learning doesn’t mean completely scrapping all standards. However, to better serve our students, perhaps a good place to start is a realistic assessment of what they can learn and should learn in any particular grade. For example, many teachers and parents lament that kindergarten is the new first or even second grade. Gone are play centers and nap time. Instead, the standards require kindergarteners to master skills of much older students much earlier.
The argument for this is pretty basic. A student who is behind in kindergarten will be far less likely to read on grade level in 4th grade than a student who mastered kindergarten standards. The question is why there is a reading standard in kindergarten in the first place.
In Finland, a country that arguably has one of the best education systems in the world, students don’t learn to read until around age seven. Until then, Finnish children enjoy a play-based education. Maybe one of the reasons that 40 percent of American 4th graders are reading below the NAEP Basic standard isn’t because they didn’t learn to read in kindergarten. Rather, no one should have expected them to. It is more likely that the frustration and dis-regulation they experienced from too much too soon has had a negative long-term impact on their love of learning.
What the standards aren’t telling us
Standards tell us the expectation for a given grade level, but there’s a lot they don’t tell us.
Does making 4th graders write five-paragraph essays make them better writers in 12th grade? Or does the pressure to meet the standards force teachers to gloss over important foundational skills so that their students’ barely legible five-paragraph essays are filled with spelling errors, grammar mistakes, and weak sentences–habits they will carry with them all through school?
Does expecting 6th graders to cite textual evidence to support analysis of a text make them lifelong readers? Are they better at discussing literature in high school, or are they burned out and tuned out?
Does doing advanced math in middle school lead to higher achievement in high school math? Is it leading to more careers in math? Or are a lot of kids getting frustrated early and labeling themselves as just “bad at math”?
The point of standards is to prepare students for college and careers, but they do not serve that purpose when the standards are not developmentally appropriate or if they are rigorous for rigor’s sake. Instead, they produce academically frustrated students who burn out by 5th grade.
If raising standards was meant to provide a more equitable education, how are they serving students who struggle to meet grade-level standards because they aren’t ready or lack support at home? In those cases, the standards only serve to reinforce students’ low self-esteem and negative attitudes about learning.
The education kids deserve
True, without standards of any kind, there’s a risk students could miss out on learning valuable skills. Educators need general, developmentally appropriate standards to inform our teaching. However, when mastery of standards, as measured through high-stakes testing, becomes the driving force behind our instruction, we are no longer educating students but rather producing a product in the form of test scores. Instead, schools should trust teachers to know their own students and adjust, within reason, their curriculum and teaching methods to meet the needs of the kids they have.
Some years this might mean dialing back on the grade-level standards and focusing on foundational skills. Other times, it might mean challenging a particular class to go beyond mandated expectations. The point is that the standards should serve the students, not the other way around.
