Political Science
2301
Federal and State
Government
OVERVIEW
For centuries,
generations of families have congregated in the same community or in the same
general region of the country. Children
grew up expecting to earn a living much like their fathers and mothers or other
adults in their community. Any advanced
skills they required beyond the three R's (Readin', Ritin' and Rithmatik) were
determined by the local community and incorporated into the curriculum of the
local schools. These advanced skills
were taught to the up-and-coming generation so they could become a vital part
of their community.
The last several
decades has greatly expanded the bounds of the "community" to almost
anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world for that matter. Advances in transportation and communication
has made the world a much smaller place then the world we knew as
children. The skills our children need
to realize parents' perpetual dream of "their children having a better
life" are no longer limited to those seen in the local area.
It is becoming
more and more apparent that the education system of yesterday cannot adequately
prepare students for life and work in the 21st Century. These concerns have prompted people across
the country to take a hard look at our education system and to organize their
efforts to chance the education system as we know it.
WHAT'S HAPPENING
OUT THERE?
There are two
major movements in recent years whose focus is to enhance the education of
future generations. The
"Standards" movement focuses on educational content and raising the
standards of traditional teaching and measurement means and methods. The "Outcome Based Education" (OBE)
movement is exploring new ways of designing education and changing the way we
measure the effectiveness of education by focusing on results or outcomes.
STANDARDS
MOVEMENT
In September 1989, President Bush and the
nation's governors called an Education Summit in Charlottesville,
Virginia. At this summit, President Bush
and the nation s governors, including then-governor Bill Clinton, agreed on six
broad goals for education to be reached by the year 2000. Two of those goals (3
and 4) related specifically to academic achievement:
* Goal 3: By the year 2000, American students will
leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject
matter including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography; and
every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds
well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning,
and productive employment in our modern economy.
* Goal 4: By the
year 2000, U.S. students will be first in the world in science and mathematics
achievement.
Soon after the summit, two groups were
established to implement the new educational goals: the National Education
Goals Panel (NEGP) and the National Council on Education Standards and Testing
(NCEST). Together, these two groups were
charged with addressing unprecedented questions regarding American education
such as: What is the subject matter to
be addressed? What types of assessments
should be used? What standards of
performance should be set?
The summit and its aftermath engendered a
flurry of activity from national subject matter organizations to establish
standards in their respective areas.
Many of these groups looked for guidance from the National Council of
Teachers of Mathematics who publishing the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards
for School Mathematics in 1989. The NCTM
standards "redefined the study of math so that topics and concepts would
be introduced at an earlier age, and students would view math as a relevant
problem-solving discipline rather than as a set of obscure formulas to be
memorized." The National Science
Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of
Science quickly launched independent attempts to identify standards in
science. Efforts soon followed in the
fields of civics, dance, theater, music, art, language arts, history, and
social studies, to name a few.
OUTCOME BASED
EDUCATION MOVEMENT
The decade of the 80s brought numerous
education reforms, but few of them were a dramatic shift from what has gone on
before. Outcome-based education (OBE) is
one of those that is new, even revolutionary, and is now being promoted as the
panacea for America's educational woes.
This reform has been driven by educators in response to demands for greater
accountability by taxpayers and as a vehicle for breaking with traditional
ideas about how we teach our children.
If implemented, this approach to curriculum development could change our
schools more than any other reform proposal in the last thirty years.
The focus of past and present curriculum
has been on content, on the knowledge to be acquired by each student. Our language, literature, history, customs,
traditions, and morals, often called Western civilization, dominated the
learning process through secondary school.
If students learned the information and performed well on tests and
assignments, they received credit for the course and moved on to the next
class. The point here is that the
curriculum centered on the content to be learned; its purpose was to produce
academically competent students. The
daily schedule in a school was organized around the content. Each hour was devoted to a given topic; some
students responded well to the instruction, and some did not.
Outcome-based education will change the
focus of schools from the content to the student. Three facts drive this new approach to
creating school curricula:
* Fact 1: All students can learn and succeed, but not
on the same day or in the same way.
* Fact 2: Each success by a student breeds more
success.
* Fact 3: Schools control the conditions of success.
In other words, students are seen as
totally malleable creatures. If we
create the right environment, any student can be prepared for any academic or
vocational career. The key is to custom
fit the schools to each student's learning style and abilities.
The resulting schools will be vastly
different from the ones recent generations attended. Yearly and daily schedules will change,
teaching responsibilities will change, classroom activities will change, the
evaluation of student performance will change, and most importantly, our
perception of what it means to be an educated person will change.
Common Arguments
in Favor of Outcome-Based Education
* Promotes high
expectations and greater learning for all students.
* Prepares
students for life and work in the 21st Century.
* Fosters more
authentic forms of assessment (i.e., students write to show they know how to
use English well, or complete math problems to demonstrate their ability to
solve problems).
* Encourages
decision making regarding curriculum, teaching methods, school structure and
management at each school or district level.
Common Arguments
Against Outcome-Based Education
* Conflicts with
admission requirements and practices of most colleges and universities, which
rely on credit hours and standardized test scores
* Some outcomes
focus too much on feelings, values, attitudes and beliefs, and not enough on
the attainment of factual knowledge
* Relies on
subjective evaluation, rather than objective tests and measurements.
* Undermines
local control.
NATIONAL
STANDARDS
Both the "Standards" movement
and "OBE" movement have particular strengths and weaknesses. Their means and methods are different however,
their objective is the same -- To
improve the education of future generations.
We all remember the profound statements our parents repeated to us as we
grew up. One of my favorites was,
"You can't get anywhere if you're not moving". Years can be spent arguing if "OBE"
is better then "Standards" and vice versa. They both are heading toward the same
destination so let's get moving and we'll argue on the way.
It is time for the Federal Government to
take the lead and start the nation down the road. One of the fundamental principles of our
nation should be the paramount concern of this Government body. EQUALITY!
In this case equality is achieved through standards.
STANDARDS IN
EDUCATION
General standards in education have
existed formally for over a century but as time went on, local school systems
have expanded their curriculum to meet the needs of the local community. National standards must be established to
alleviate variances from community to community and state to state in order for
all citizens to have an equal chance in the global society.
THE NEED FOR
CURRICULUM STANDARDS
From the 1940s until the mid-1970s, the
emphasis on serving the interests of individual children generated a expansion
of the number of courses that constituted the high school curriculum. By the mid 1970s, the U.S. Office of
Education reported that more than 2,100 different courses were being offered in
American high schools. The content
covered and the manner in which time is spent was at one time fairly uniform in
American education, today there is little consistency in how much time students
spend on a given subject or the knowledge and skills covered within that
subject area.
THE NEED FOR
EVALUATION STANDARDS
Perhaps the most compelling argument for
organizing educational reform around standards is the shift in emphasis from
what schools put into the process of schooling to what we get out of schools
that is, a shift from educational "inputs" to educational
"outputs". Chester Finn
describes this shift in perspective in terms of an emerging paradigm for
education.
Under the old conception education was
thought of as process and system, effort and intention, investment and
hope. To improve education meant to try
harder, to engage in more activity, to magnify one's plans, to give people more
services, and to become more efficient in delivering them.
Under the new definition, now struggling
to be born, education is the result achieved, the learning that takes root when
the process has been effective. Only if
the process succeeds and learning occurs will we say that education
happened. The U.S. Office of Education
was commissioned by Congress to conduct a major study of the quality of
educational opportunity. The result was
the celebrated "Coleman Report" (after chief author and researcher,
James Coleman), which was released in 1966.
The report concluded that input variables might not actually have all
that much to do with educational equality when equality was conceived of in
terms of what students actually learned as opposed to the time, money, and
energy that were expended.
In summary, the new, more efficient and
accountable view of education is output-based.
Outputs defined in terms of specific student learnings, in terms of
specific standards.
THE NEED FOR
GRADING STANDARDS
Most assume that grades are precise
indicators of what students know and can do with a subject area. In addition, most people assume that current
grading practices are the result of a careful study of the most effective ways of
reporting achievement and progress. In
fact, current grading practices developed in a fairly serendipitous way. Mark Durm provides a detailed description of
the history of grading practices in America, beginning in the 1780s when Yale
University first started using a four-point scale. By 1897, Mount Holyoke College began using
the letter grade system that is so widely used in education today.
For the most part, this 100-year-old
system is still in place today.
Unfortunately, even though the system has been in place for a century,
there is still not much agreement as to the exact meaning of letter
grades. This was rather dramatically
illustrated in a nationwide study by Robinson & Craver (1988) that involved
over 800 school districts randomly drawn from the 11,305 school districts with
300 or more students. One of their major
conclusions was that districts stress different elements in their grades.
While all districts include academic
achievement, they also include other significant elements such as effort,
behavior, and attendance. There is great
discrepancy in the factors teachers consider when they construct grades. We have a situation in which grades given by
one teacher might mean something entirely different from grades given by
another teacher even though the teachers are presiding over two identical
classes with identical students who do identical work.
Where one teacher might count effort and cooperation as 25% of a grade,
another teacher might not count these variables at all.
CONCLUSION
Nearly all countries we want to emulate
rely on policies and structures that are fundamentally standards based in
nature. For example, in their study of
standards-setting efforts in other countries, Resnick and Nolan (1995) note
that Many countries whose schools have achieved academic excellence have a
national curriculum. "Many
educators maintain that a single curriculum naturally leads to high
performance, but the fact that the United States values local control of
schools precludes such a national curriculum."
Although they caution that a well
articulated national curriculum is not a guarantee of high academic
achievement, Resnick and Nolan offer some powerful illustrations of the
effectiveness of identifying academic standards and aligning curriculum and
assessments with those standards. France is a particularly salient example:
* In texts and
exams, the influence of the national curriculum is obvious. For example, a
French math text for 16-year-olds begins by spelling out the national curriculum
for
* the year so
that all 16-year-olds know what they are expected to study. The book's similar
table of contents shows that the text developers referred to the curriculum.
* Moreover, the
text makes frequent references to math exams the regional school districts have
given in the past. Students practice on these exams to help them prepare for
the exam they will face; they know where to concentrate to meet the standard.
(p. 9)
In a similar vein, a report published by
NESIC, the National Education Standards and Improvement Council (1993), details
the highly centralized manner in which standards are established in other
countries. For example, in China,
standards are set for the entire country and for all levels of the school
system by the State Education Commission in Beijing. In England, standard setting was considered
the responsibility of local schools until 1988, when the Education Reform Act
mandated and outlined the process for establishing a national curriculum. The School Examinations and Assessment
Council was established to carry out this process. In Japan, the ministry of education in Tokyo
(Manibushi) sets the standards for schools, but allows each of the 47
prefectures (Ken) some latitude in adapting those standards.
According to the NESIC report, "Most
countries embody their content standards in curriculum guides issued by the
ministries of education or their equivalents." (pc-51) Additionally,
"A national examination system provides a further mechanism for setting
standards through specifications of examinations, syllabuses and regulations,
preparations of tests, grading of answers, and establishment of cutoff
points." (pc-51)
If our children are to survive and excel
in the emerging global society, we must give them the tools they need to
compete. Whether future generations
receive these tools via the "Standards" movement or the
"OBE" movement is irrelevant.
It is how well our children can compete with other countries of the
world that will insure the United States remains a world leader, a nation
united and strong. If this is not a role
for the Federal Government, I don't know what is?
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