My Three Wishes: If I could change Standards, Standardized Testing, and Standardized Curriculum

In this episode, host Miriam Brown, a seasoned teacher with a background in psychology and curriculum instruction, delves into the intricacies of educational standards, standardized testing, and pre-made curriculum. Miriam clarifies the often-confused terms and explains their impact on students and teachers alike.

She discusses the Common Core standards, the rationale behind standardized tests, and the challenges posed by pre-made lesson plans. Miriam also shares her thoughts on the unrealistic goals set by current educational standards and offers practical advice for parents to help their children succeed in public school.

Whether you're a parent, educator, or just interested in the education system, this episode provides valuable insights on the complexities of public schooling.

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
When my oldest son Jackson was in third grade, he came home at the end of the
year and told me to prepare myself, because he probably wasn't going to graduate third grade.
I asked him why he thought that, and he said that they'd given him a great big
test to see how much he learned that year, and he didn't even understand most of the questions.
He said that in math, they were asking questions about letters instead of numbers.

(00:23):
He said he tried his best, but he was pretty sure he failed.
I explained to him that the test probably kept on going past third grade math,
and that using letters and math was called algebra, which he would learn in high school.
Sure enough, I later got a call from his teacher saying that he scored proficient
on a 10th grade level, proving that he's a really good guesser,

(00:44):
since he had no idea what he was doing, and I certainly hadn't been teaching
algebra to my third grader.
I don't believe in trying to push your kid to learn more than what is the grade level standard?
I think it's better to allow them to broaden their learning to other things
they're interested in, rather than forcing them to get ahead and be bored because
they already know everything the teacher is teaching.

(01:05):
But how do you know what kids are supposed to learn in each grade?
This season, I want to help you understand what the grade level expectations
are so that you can make sure your kid stays caught up.
Hello, I'm your host, Miriam Brown. In addition to my teaching certificate,
I have a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's in curriculum and instruction.

(01:29):
I spent the last decade as a teacher, and I want to give you insider tips on
how to help your child do well in public school.
Today, I want to talk about three important terms that I see parents on social
media and in my circles getting mixed up.
The words are similar, so it's easy to see why they would be confusing.
The words are standards, standardized testing, and standardized curriculum.

(01:51):
These can be a bit controversial, and I think that a lot of that comes because
educators and parents and politicians aren't even speaking the same language.
So how can we work out our differences?
Music.
I come from a very large family, and my siblings and I all have radically different ideas about schooling.

(02:13):
One day, I was talking to my brother Richard about education,
and he asked what I thought of the Common Core.
I asked what he had heard about it, then I asked him if he had ever read the
Common Core, and he admitted that he hadn't.
He's really open-minded, so he later
read it and told me that it wasn't as objectionable as he thought it was.
With the exception of some academic articles I've read, I've never heard anyone

(02:34):
complain that has actually read the Common Core standards.
They'll often show a picture of a weird problem on a worksheet and complain
about new math, but they aren't really talking about the Common Core standards.
So if you hate the Common Core, I encourage you to Google the actual standards and read them.
I promise that you will get very bored, but I doubt you'll find much that you

(02:57):
actually disagree with.
The Common Core is really just a list of things that educators want kids to
know by the end of each grade, and they're really normal things that parents
would want their child to learn.
It's broken up into specific goals. These goals are called standards.
The standards use a lot of technical terms, and they can be confusing.
Yogi's teacher just sent home a newsletter, and she had listed what they were learning.

(03:20):
She had translated the standards into easier words like, I can write a personal narrative.
The way it's described in the Common Core actually says this,
Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective
technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.
That sounds pretty boring, right? It's written this way to let teachers know

(03:42):
exactly how to help kids write their personal story.
Kids need to learn to know how to start, how to add details,
and how to put things in an order that makes sense.
There's also substandards that give more details about adding dialogue and how to end the story.
So for parents, it all gets a little tedious to read. but would any parent get

(04:03):
mad and say, I don't want my child to write stories?
No, that would be silly.
That being said, there are actually some valid critiques of the standards.
The purpose of these standards is to make sure that no matter where you are
in the country, every child learns the same basic skills.
However, not every child comes to school with the same knowledge base.

(04:25):
In fact, most kids are far behind before they ever even start kindergarten.
According to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics, since the pandemic,
70% of kindergartners don't know what they need to know to start kindergarten.
But guess what it was before the pandemic?
60%. So the majority, I'd even say the vast majority of kids aren't ready.

(04:51):
So if the goals are based on the assumption that all kids are starting kindergarten,
knowing their letters and numbers and how to write their name,
and that assumption just isn't true, then you're setting kids up to fail to meet those goals.
Psychologists and and sociologists have learned a lot about setting achievable
goals, but education often prefers to set idealistic goals that are not at all realistic.

(05:15):
Even before the Common Core Standards, the states that were doing really well
in education were having less than half of their students meet the educational
goals in math and reading.
So instead of trying to figure out using statistics and actual data about what
students can be expected to learn in a real-world scenario, they made the Common
Core standards even higher than the previous standards that kids already weren't meeting.

(05:38):
So yeah, for me, it is not that the Common Core is forcing my kids to learn
stuff I don't want them to learn.
For me, the problem is that setting unrealistic goals of achievement causes
anxiety for teachers and students
and leads many very intelligent kids to conclude that they aren't smart.
I think society pays a price when we lose great minds because we're unwilling

(06:00):
to meet them where they're at.
So if I had a magic wand or three wishes, I would change things,
but I wore myself out trying to change the system.
Instead, I want to let regular parents know what the expectations are so that
they can help their own kid if they're falling behind, because nobody cares
about your kid as much as you do.

(06:21):
So, now that we've talked about standards, they're just goals,
let's talk about standardized tests.
A test is a way to measure what someone knows. However, anyone who can remember
school knows that some teachers make hard tests and some teachers make easy tests.
As teachers, we receive surprisingly little training on how to design test questions.

(06:43):
For example, some kids learn pretty early on that all of the above is almost
always the right answer.
And that's because it's a really easy type of question for teachers to write.
But poorly written questions can't really tell if the kid has learned the material.
They might just be a good guesser like my son Jackson. So a standardized test
is a way to take the teacher's test writing ability out of the equation.

(07:08):
Instead, professional test question writers are given the job of writing good
questions that will give every kid a chance to show what they know.
Some parents and educators get mad about standardized tests because it takes
up classroom time that could be spent learning, and it can cause anxiety for students and teachers.
Schools get evaluated on their results. Often these evaluations are unfair.

(07:32):
In my job, part of my salary was based on the results of all the students in
the grade level, even if they weren't in my class, and it didn't take into account
their skills before they came
to my class, so even if they made a ton of progress, I still got dinged.
So standardized testing can be really frustrating, but I do think it should play a role in school.

(07:53):
With my magic wand, after making the standards more reasonable,
I would change the tests to give out more than just a number and a rank.
I think it would be more helpful if at the end of the test they told you how
much progress you had made that year, and I would also like to see it give both
teachers and students recommendations recommendations on how they could improve.

(08:13):
The last term we need to talk about is curriculum.
Many districts give their teachers pre-made lesson plans called curriculum.
These are very costly, so often districts tell teachers they have to use them
so that they don't feel like they wasted their money.
This can be frustrating for teachers because sometimes those purchased lesson
plans are too far above what the students in the class are ready to learn,

(08:36):
and sometimes they're too far below the student's level.
And often they're kind of scripted and not very engaging.
So why do districts demand that teachers use the pre-made lesson plans?
I think part of it is because there are so many new teachers.
Since the majority of teachers quit within the first few years,
there are few that have been teaching long enough to juggle all of the teaching responsibilities.

(09:01):
It's simply overwhelming to start teaching. You have to learn how to manage
kids and preparing lessons is really time consuming.
If you were going to speak in public for six hours, how much time would you take to prepare?
Also, since new teachers are getting hard to find, districts often hire people
who aren't actually certified to fill the slot.

(09:22):
The pre-made lesson plans are a way to help those teachers who weren't trained
to create lesson plans and tests to do their job properly.
Districts are actually trying to teacher-proof education because not very many
people want to pay for a college education that won't give you a high enough
salary to cover your student loans.
Loans so districts are trying to do the best they

(09:43):
can under the circumstances because people don't
want to pay more taxes so we can recruit teachers so i
guess you just get what you pay for often those
silly questions that you see on social media come from these pre-made lesson
plans that make no sense to the students that are using them to be fair sometimes
there are silly questions that teachers made themselves are bought on teachers

(10:06):
pay teachers parents get mad at the new math that is getting taught. But math is math.
It's a universal constant. It doesn't really change.
It's just that some lesson plans are taught in a different way than parents are used to.
Sometimes it's good that the new ways of teaching math are getting explored though.
When I was a kid, I was really good at plugging numbers into a formula if you told me which one to use.

(10:31):
But if you gave me a story problem, I would be completely lost because I didn't
really understand what I was doing with the numbers I was plugging.
New math is just trying to help kids understand at a deeper level,
but that can be frustrating for parents who don't see the purpose.
So for my final wish, I would use my magic wand to pay teachers more so that the very brightest,

(10:53):
most charismatic and caring people would want to become teachers and that districts
could feel comfortable letting them adjust their lesson plans or create new
ones to meet the needs of the kids in their class.
Unfortunately, I don't actually have a magic wand or three wishes.
So if you're a parent who's frustrated about your child's education,

(11:14):
maybe it's time to write to your senator and your congressman and explain why
public education is important and what you would like to see change.
Now you have some fancy new words you can use to describe what you're seeing.
Are you upset by the grade level standards or goals? Do you think they need to be higher or lower?
Would Would you like to see a change in how student learning is measured by standardized tests?

(11:36):
Or maybe you'd like your child's teacher to have more flexibility with their
lesson plans so that they can better meet the needs of the kids in their class.
Or maybe you want to see them get paid more so that more people go into the profession.
But whatever you do, make sure that if you post on social media,
try to communicate the problem without making your child's teacher feel bad

(11:57):
because the problem of teachers leaving the profession is already bad enough.
But maybe right now you just want to put down your phone and go play with your kid.