Using Standards and Assessments

Schmoker, Mike, et. Marzano, Robert. “Using Standards and Assessments: Realizing the Promise of Standards-Based Education.” Education Leadership. Volume 56 Number 8 March 1999.

This article take a good look at some of the positive and negative consequences realized at the introduction standards based education. Schmocker and Marzano remark at the almost obvious fact that organizations are successful when they have “clear, commonly defined goals.” This is due to its ability foster a “common focus” that “clarifies understanding, accelerates communication, and promotes persistence and collective purpose.

Demonstrating the truth behind this idea, the article continues by calling on examples of schools attaining increased student “success” via various forms of implementing or establishing education based in content standards. These, most likely because of when it was written, are introduced as the signs of an increasing wave of standards based education.

The writers sets this new wave apart from already set standards in education by marking the status quo of “a common, coherent program of teaching and learning” as a delusion. This is attributed to teachings making “independent and idiosyncratic decisions” about how and what to teach. This they connected to a lack of clear or practical standards; they either written in unclear “absurd” language or demand a teaching of material that would take “a 10-hour day of teaching” to cover. (This supported by a comparison between German, Japanese, and American textbooks showing American textbooks as attempting to cover much more content—while German and Japanese students out performing American students)

With this the largest problems associated with standards based teaching are realized—that of inconsistency in how things are taught and too much to teach. The solution that the authors draw as a potential cure all would be standards driven schools—with standards assumedly connected to state standards (as an example of state standards being a solution is presented).

This allows for a small enough environments to assure consistency while allowing for customization of curricula around practices that have proven successful for teachers at that school. This would, as the writers say, create a pool of resources that are particular to the schools’ environment, students, and content goals—as directed by standards.

From my experience this article successfully addresses the pitfalls that could come up from the wide implementation of standards based learning, and successfully pulls out a solution that I have seen to work. My school implements a similar model discussed by Scmocker and Marzano, which has allowed a customization of curricula and a collection of best practices within departments. This model along with a strong emphasis on communication between teachers, both releases the burden from teachers to come up with new ways of teaching but also enlightens teachers to best practices and warns of the lest than best.