9486 in the collection  

A Reporter Voices Frustration with Proposed Minnesota Standards

Confused by all this talk about what kids need to learn?

Put off by politicians, pundits and professors preaching about what a public school education should be?

It's time to tune in anyway. Big things are happening in education that could show up in your school as early as this fall. Right now, people in the Legislature are trying to figure out what your kids need to learn in the classroom.

Still want to skip this and head back to the TV listings? Hang on a minute. Maybe we can help.
We're going to simplify things. There won't be any experts quoted in this story. Instead, we're going to translate what's going on into plain English. You can decide what you like and what you don't.

What's at stake? Rules for learning, from kindergarten through high school.

Those rules might say that kindergartners need to know how to read from left to right, and from top to bottom. Fifth-graders might have to tell the difference between folk tales and fables. Eighth-graders could be required to know the formulas for the volumes of cubes, prisms, spheres and cylinders. These are real examples. There are hundreds more.

"Might" and "could be" are key words here because, so far, there's no agreement on which rules to use.

There are two sets making the rounds at the State Capitol. Let's call these rules "academic standards" to make the bureaucrats and educators happy.

Cheri Pierson Yecke, Minnesota's education commissioner, is behind one set. Generally, supporters of this batch like kids to know lots of facts that can be measured by tests. For now, the Cheri standards just cover language arts and math.

Sen. Steve Kelley, a DFLer from Hopkins, supports a different set of standards. These were drawn up more than a year ago by teachers. Supporters of Steve's standards tend not to like pure facts and testing as much. They want kids to be judged more by projects and performances.

The Legislature's trying to figure out whether to approve Cheri's standards, Steve's standards or a combination of the two. A decision could come as early as this week.

Brace yourself: There are hundreds of them!
Let's move on to what these different standards look like. This won't be an exact comparison, because Cheri's and Steve's standards are written up differently. It'll be like comparing, say, oranges and tangerines.

The first thing that stands out is the number of standards. There are lots of Cheri standards. In language arts, they are subdivided into things called "benchmarks." For counting purposes, let's just bunch all these things together and call them "the things kids have to know and do."

We count 559 of these in the Cheri language arts group and 323 in math. There are far fewer Steve know-and-do things to deal with -- by our count, 198 for language arts and 159 for math.
Here's a big difference between Cheri's and Steve's standards: With the exception of the high school years, Cheri's standards are set out grade by grade. Steve's are clumped into categories: primary, intermediate, middle school and high school. So when you're looking at a Steve standard for the primary grades, it could apply to any grade between kindergarten and third, for instance.

Know these words? Go straight to grad school
Let's try some compare-and-contrast exercises. From the looks of it, nobody involved in these standards will get good grades for clear composition. For example, take Cheri's first-grade language arts standards and Steve's reading, viewing and listening standards for primary grades.

Here's one of Cheri's standards:
"Identify medial sounds in single-syllable words." Medial? A trip to the dictionary reveals this definition: "Situated between the extremes of initial and final in a word or morpheme." No help there.

How about this one from Steve's standards:
"Make sense of words and comprehend meaning in grade-appropriate fiction and nonfiction selections by integrating cueing systems, including graphophonic, structure and meaning." Got that?

From the broad to the utterly basic
Some standards seem really broad. For example, Steve's standards require kids to understand "the print conventions of English." That seems like a fair amount of ground to cover. There are also standards that might make you think, "Duh!" For instance, the Cheri standard that requires second-graders to "increase mastery of skills learned in previous grades." Hard to find fault with that one.

2nd (and 3rd) verse, same as the first
Some give you that feeling of déjà vu. Cheri requires kindergartners to "listen to and look at literature for personal enjoyment." Go to the first-grade standards, and there that phrase is again, word for word. For second grade, the word "read" and a comma are added to the beginning of the sentence. It stays the same in the third, fourth and fifth grades.

Just as we're starting to get comfortable with this standard, it gets tweaked again in the sixth grade to say: "Read from a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts of increasing complexity for personal enjoyment." It stays that way through eighth grade, then disappears from the standards altogether. Enough repetition, we guess.

Reading about reading harder than it sounds
Nevertheless, Cheri's language arts standards are more detailed and plainly written. In the lower grades, Cheri wants kids to be able to do things such as print their first and last names, use periods and question marks in the right places, and write a friendly letter.

Once in a while, Steve's standards get down to the nitty-gritty, too. They want students to know what italics, antonyms, chapter titles, alliteration, metaphors and imagery mean, and to understand such types of literature as fairy tales, fantasy, folk tales, poetry, historical and realistic fiction, and biography and autobiography.

But a lot of them are more like this:
"A student shall demonstrate the ability to interact with grade-appropriate fiction and nonfiction selections during the reading, viewing and listening process by monitoring and using self-correction strategies, for example, re-reading, noticing miscues, searching for cues, and asking for help." In other words, "figure out how to read better."

Here's something that might surprise you: There are no suggested reading lists in either the Cheri or Steve standards. Not one recommended book.

Math rules may multiply anxiety

Math is pretty much the same story: scads more Cheri standards that tend to be more specific and easier to understand, at least in the lower grades.

There's plenty in her standards about being able to count, tell time and recognize different denominations of money.

But there also are standards that are going to flummox parents who cringe whenever their kids ask for help with math homework. Like this one: "Model simple problems, arising from concrete situations, involving the addition and subtraction of fractions and mixed numbers with like and unlike denominators of 12 or less."

Here's one place where Steve's standards win on simplicity. In his intermediate (grades 4-6) standards, students have to be able to "fluently add, subtract, multiply, and divide whole numbers." Plain as day. Thank you.

What about clarity? Is THAT a standard?
Things start getting really dicey in both the Steve and Cheri high school math standards. To wit:

A Steve standard: "A student shall demonstrate the ability to display bivarate data using a scatterplot and describe the shape of the data."

A Cheri standard: Demonstrate the ability to manipulate an equation by applying arithmetic operations to both sides to maintain equivalence."

Good for you if you can figure those two out. We'll leave 'em to the experts.


— Norman Draper
A map of sorts for navigating Minnesota's academic standards
Star Tribune
April 30, 2003
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1592/3855004.html

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