Monday, December 17, 2001
With the State Board of Education voting unanimously last Tuesday to adopt new English language arts and mathematics academic content standards, all sectors of Ohio's education system -- teacher-training institutions, school districts, administrators, teachers and parents -- can now be on the same page when it comes to understanding what children are expected to learn and when they are expected to know it. And with the Congress close to sending the educational reform bill to the president, the state should have increased funding to help children reach those standards.
The new standards and their accompanying benchmarks are rigorous and challenging; no one can characterize them as ambiguous. Thus, every teacher and parent of a first grader can know that when it comes to reading, children at that level should be able to:
UDescribe the role of authors and illustrators.
UEstablish a purpose for reading (e.g., to be informed, to follow directions or to be entertained).
UVisualize the information in texts, and demonstrate this by drawing pictures, discussing images in texts or writing simple descriptions.
UMake predictions while reading, and support these predictions with information from the text or prior experience.
UCompare information in texts with prior knowledge and experience.
URecall the important ideas in fictional and non-fictional texts.
UCreate and use graphic organizers such as Venn diagrams or webs, with teacher assistance, to demonstrate comprehension.
UAnswer literal, simple inferential and evaluative questions to demonstrate comprehension of grade-appropriate print texts, electronic and visual media.
Aligned curriculum: While there is no requirement that school districts align their curriculum with the state standards, they'd be foolish not to -- and not just because future state achievement tests will be based on the new standards. After all, the standards were developed after a year-long process of gathering and reviewing input from Ohio teachers, parents, administrators, nonpublic schools, colleges and universities, educational service centers, businesses and community leaders. What school district has the expertise and resources to re-invent the wheel?
What individual districts, principals and teachers can and must do is to develop the methods and choose the materials that will allow each child in their classrooms to meet the benchmarks -- recognizing that all children do not learn in the same way, and all children do not have the same advantages and family support.
For inner-city districts, particularly, as the current proficiency tests have demonstrated, thousands of children are not learning the way most other children learn.
There can be no doubt that more teachers need training in the methods that will help the learning-resistant learn -- whether that training takes place in Ohio's colleges of education, in teacher mentoring programs or school in-service programs.
We would hope that the funding allocated to Ohio in the new federal school reform bill will be used, at least in part, for such purposes.
The bipartisan legislation, known as the & quot;No Child Left Behind & quot; bill, which soon heads to President Bush for his signature, authorizes $26.5 billion in federal spending for the 2002 fiscal year that began Oct. 1 -- some $7 billion more than last year. Much of that money will go to low-income students in low-achieving schools.
The federal measure and the state standards acknowledge that quality education is a national concern and must be a national goal. Whatever the cost of education, it is far cheaper than the costs of the alternatives