2007 February Archive at The Core Knowledge Blog

By David J. Hoff

Congress should set up a process to establish national academic standards and tests that states could adopt as their own or use as a model for improving their current standards, a high-profile bipartisan panel says in a report released today.

Lawmakers also should appropriate $400 million over four years for states to create data systems to track individual students’ academic growth from year to year and determine the effectiveness of individual teachers, the Commission on No Child Left Behind urges in its final report.

… The panel recommends that the federal government convene a group of experts to write model standards and tests using the proficiency definitions for the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress. States would have the option of either adopting those standards and tests or revising their own assessments to measure the content of the national standards. The states could also keep their own academic standards.

“To keep the public informed about states’ expectations,” the report says, the U.S. Department of Education should issue periodic reports comparing every state’s standards and tests with the ones in the national model.

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by Andrew Wolf

… Some years back, the reporting of the results of the common standardized tests was altered, not to show the average achievement of students in a school or a district, but to determine the percentage achieving or exceeding something called “grade level,” a measure of minimal competence. By this gauge, the child who is barely getting by, meeting this minimal standard counts equally with the super-star prodigy pondering quantum physics.

… Is it any wonder that instruction has been dumbed down in American schools, when educrats are rewarded and honored not for bringing more children to the top, but for nudging more over some contrived midpoint of mediocrity?

… Math is not the only area impacted by this “march to the middle.” Content area instruction has carefully been removed from American classrooms, a phenomenon that a University of Virginia professor named E.D. Hirsch Jr. noticed decades ago. Mr. Hirsch has come up with a real-world solution — a content-rich back-to-basics curriculum called Core Knowledge that is winning favor with schools and parents across the country.

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