The “power standard” is simply a standard that needs extra focus.

(I didn’t know that; I just used the mighty Google.)

For example, we have determined by looking at our data exactly which kind of problems our students do the worst on. (Everything graphing, basically.) Then we can work on our professional development to fine tune our teaching of those standards, rather than working on the entire curriculum or once or just cherry-picking the “easy” lessons. (We’ve never used a buzzword for it, though.)

From an administative standpoint, sending a late-day email demanding (insert buzzword here) from teachers was the wrong way to go about things, but surely the idea itself isn’t that bad?

Surely the idea itself isn’t that bad?

Of course not. And yet the NEA heralds teacher ignorance and apathy toward ideas whose basic precepts are only a Google search away.

In Arizona those managing the test are very careful not to give away which standards might show up more or less often. (Even though we can guess that there won’t be 10 questions on ‘construct a duplicate of a triangle using a straightedge and compass’ on a multiple choice test.)

It sounds like California policy might have been a well meaning attempt to hint at which standards are important, but it ended up being used as an administrative cudgel.

The other element to all this is a difference in subject matter. If I taught math naturally without any thought to tests, then went back and looked at the standards (in our state) I’d find I’ve hit essentially all of them.

With an English class, though, I can’t imagine that’d be the case.

or how it’s going to help her students

That’s the key part to me. If teachers can’t see the need to teach the standard, isn’t that the real trouble? If I, as a lover of my content area, can’t get behind teaching my English students a certain standard and honestly see absolutely no way that it’s going to help those kids in the future, why should I teach it? Are we teaching things simply because they are listed as state standards or because we honestly think they will improve the lives of our students? Look at the criteria on Reeves’s list: they all boil down to how the skill will be useful later in life.

Is this really going to be the beginning of the next standards war? Sign me up ’cause I got a list a mile long of irrefutable problems (since my district is in PI, that mile-long list grows just about every week). There is a much shorter list of how standards in English/Language Arts are for the benefit of students, but that list exists, too.

And, just for the record as far as my experience serves and I’ve been on the committee that’s picked ’em twice over for my district, power standards are typically defined by districts so everywhere you go will have different ones. We reached ours after looking at the table of specs for the HSEE and STAR. Those standards that were tested most often became strong candidates for our power standards. We put Reeves to use, as well. I dare say that most other districts follow a similar procedure, but interpretations of the whole ENDURANCE, LEVERAGE, READINESS thinking is what leads to differences.

Dan, with all due respect, when you’re at a PI school, that’s not always how it’s put, the standard, not the learning is what is critical, and it IS decontextualized, so that I was asked to teach a standard out of order. What do I mean by that? I was asked why I had not yet covered a math standard that was a “power standard”. I explained that before I could teach that, kids had to master another standard that was a little lower down on the the food chain (ex. you can’t teach long division without mastering multiplication, etc.) ANYONE who has taught Math would realize how LUDICROUS her request was. She seemed miffed that wasn’t going to heed her advice.

Todd, the reason we are teaching those standards is because they are on the test (as you showed in your example from your district where you aligned the power standards with the tests). In many cases, they are neither pertinent to their future, nor developmentally appropriate

I love my standards. I have a list of them and after I’ve planned a lesson, I go through the list and see which ones I’m hitting. Usually I’m pulling from at least two, if not three, different places.

Clearly, my standards were put together by theme and not by skill.

When I teach the class, I teach it by scaffolded skill. Doesn’t everyone? Even English teachers?

I have no idea what a power standard is, unless it is a foundational skill (before you can multiply, you need to be able to add). If you decontextualize the skills, then students have to find the connections themselves which is something they cannot do as they don’t have a broad view of the subject like one of us who has a degree in it and then a teaching license on top of it, can do.

:: sigh :: NCLB drives me crazy, but as I tell my students: focus on the learning, and the grades will follow.

Yeah, it can be done. The possibility exists, sure.

But when the state breathing down your neck says the equivalent of “We want this done NOW; you have one month to turn around a plan for your entire district to meet these objectives,” it’s completely within reason to just grab what’s already been done. It’s also strongly urged by the state representatives that districts do what has already been done by other districts. Those PI meetings are not fun and they are not centered on improving student learning.

Bad management does have a lot to do with NCLB because it’s that bad management that sets ridiculous time frames on when these grand and sweeping decisions need to be made. That limits the ability to think of better ways to implement them. Also, those decisions are pushed by those at the state level who believe that what’s been done before is the best way to do it. It’s not that the mandates are necessarily beyond the pale (that’s another discussion), it’s that schools and districts aren’t given the resources to make the best decisions for their constituency.

Do you really think the state is worried about content standard accountability? Or are they just worried about what’s currently parading around under that guise? I have to vote for the latter since those making decisions quite often have never been in a classroom since they were students.

I won’t abandon teaching what’s worth my students’ time as measured by how it will affect their later lives simply because some teachers are totally incompetent. And that’s really why the standards are there: because some teachers, without them, would just show movies all day.

Sometimes? It kills me day in and day out when I walk past the doors to those classrooms on my campus.

And it kills me that I am held to the same level of what’s now called accountability just because those teachers cannot be trusted to actually teach something of value without the state coming down with its mandates (read as: standards). I have a good idea of what I have to teach that will become useful to students later in life within my area of expertise. Most of my state standards are not among those skills.

or how it’s going to help her students

Yup, I feel the same way.

This thread is really pissing me off, which means I’m not at all objective about this, which is making me laugh (at myself).

Look, you all are saying that the this is a statement against standards, and teaching standards. I think you are reading too much into the ambivalence of the teacher character in this story to “power standards” I think it’s a statement against Orwellian edu-speak (power standards, scientifically proven effective instructional practices, etc.)

Folks like me fill in the blanks and see all the cruddy teaching practices we have to contort ourselves into because of testing demands.

Maybe the lazy get to see what they want (stupid standards!), while the rest of us who are and do ground their practice in standards see standards based instruction abused (and being used to abuse us, and students).

As to the reasons for accountability, you see lazy colleagues who didn’t bother teaching, which led to this. I see the class in Oakland that the principal deliberately placed with a series of short-term subs EVERY year they were in his elementary school (over the objections of the union rep) and did not separate them, and refused to entertain the idea of alternatively credentialing any of the subs who were willing to work the class.

There will never be a meeting of the minds on this, but I hope that folks see that just because someone twitches at the term “power standard” that doesn’t mean we’ve abandonned the idea teaching standards at all.

That’s what I’m here for.

or can you do it “virtually” anywhere?