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INTRODUCTION
Every decade or so, the
Ohio State Board of Education adopts a new set of academic goals, called Academic Content Standards. State-wide achievement tests are then used to asses how well primary and secondary students learn the material that is defined in the content standards.
Logically, for this arrangement to work, the classroom hours required to teach the "content" can not exceed the classroom hours available in a school year. And, as a practical matter, the annual content hours should be less than a full school year. The
concept of adequate time-to-teach introduces four considerations: fairness for slow learners, challenge for fast learners, meaning of assessment tests, and cost of implementation for school boards.
An academic standard that is overloaded with content (stuff to learn) is not fair to "average" students because there are not enough classroom hours to gain proficiency on the materials in the state standards. It is even more punishing for students in the below average achievement ranges. Each year, the slow learners will fall further behind. And, in the process become more and more discouraged with school learning. This concern about the fairness of Ohio's new academic standards has motivated the letter shown below.
When time-to-teach hours of a state standard are kept comfortably below the time available in a school year, the question of how to keep fast-learners challenged emerges. Obviously, adding more "stuff" to the "common knowledge" in the state standard is not the answer. One possible approach would be to delegate the task of challenging fast learners to district school boards. The Ohio Department of Education's role might be to develop a list of common-knowledge-plus courses for selective use by school boards. The topic of challenging fast learners is NOT addressed in the letter shown below.
Assessment tests based on unrealistic academic goals will have little meaning. Low test scores could be attributed to either: inappropriate State Board of Education standards, poorly designed test questions, unaligned district-level courses of study, ineffective teachers, unmotivated students, or bad luck. The letter shown below does NOT carry a discussion of how to analysis low test scores.
An overloaded academic content standard has cost implications, such as: Teachers will ask for more help in their classrooms. After-school tutors will be required. Administrators may call for an extended school year. School districts will need more tax money for the expanded programs. These and other cost implications are NOT discussed in the letter shown below.
LETTER TO THE STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION
With a concern about the time-to-teach average students and slow learning students, this
citizen wrote to Mr. Michael Collins, chair of Board's new academic standards committee. All other State Board of Education members were sent a copy of the letter. A reformatted copy of the April 14, 2010 letter to Mr. Collins is shown below.
AN OPEN LETTER
April 14, 2010
Mr. Michael Collins, member
Ohio State Board of Education
25 South Front St.
. 7th Floor
Columbus, OH 43215-4183
Dear Mr. Collins:
This letter is a follow-on to our telephone conversation last week. Back in September 2003, I wrote to all members of the State Board of Education complaining about the Board's unwillingness to define the time-to-teach targets for major components of the 2002/2003 Academic Content Standards. By one estimate in 1999, the teaching time for a typical state academic standard takes over 120 percent of a typical school year.[1] During the intervening years, no time-to-teach studies were conducted in Ohio on components of the current standards. Yet, passing cut-scores far below 90 percent were common on state-wide criteria-based tests.
For Ohio's learning goals to be rational, the classroom time needed to teach the academic standards to an average student by an average teacher should be limited to perhaps 70 percent of each school year. The other 30 percent would then be available to local school boards for: additions to the local curriculum, tutoring for slow learners, challenge assignments for fast learners, custom-designed student projects, and teachers' creativity.
The legal justification, for requiring the academic content designers to prioritize and limit what they put in Ohio's learning goals, is in the Ohio Constitution. Article VI, Section 2 reads in part, "The General assembly shall...secure a through and efficient system of common schools..." A "common school" is a nineteenth century term for a school that teaches "common knowledge". Some now call this "core knowledge". In this paradigm, "raising the bar" doesn't mean adding more content to the curriculum; it means raising the quality of learning by students. That is, concentrating on the most important content and then allowing enough time-to-teach so that almost all students will score at least 90 percent on criteria-based common-knowledge tests.
Only the Ohio Board of Education has the authority to set hour limits for the academic-content designers. Please remember, this is not a call for specific academic content, but rather a request for strategic time-to-teach guidelines for both the new academic standards and the high school syllabi. This would be a four-step process:
Adopting learning goals that are not designed to fit into each of the K-through-12 school years is unfair to local school boards and their students.
Sincerely,
Bill Buckel, Ohio Taxpayer
1641 Hess Blvd.
Columbus, OH 43212
. Ph. 614--488-8963
cc:
Other Board members
Other interested people
[1] Robert J. Marzano et al, Essential Knowledge, 1999, pages 102 and 103.
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Bill Buckel
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Up-dated: June 23, 2010