State Standards: What are they good for?

State Standards: what are they good for?

Bradley A. Bowers

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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State Standards:What Are They Good For?

“I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.”- Former First Lady of the

United States, Michelle Obama. State standards, created under the Reagan administration and

furthered under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of George W. Bush’s administration is

one of heavy criticism from teachers and administration alike. Further, under the Obama

Administration, we saw an increase in use for state and national standards in the years 2008-2016

and it caused an uproar. To fully understand the complexities of State Standards, however, we

have to take a deep dive into their history as well as the standards themselves.

History of the standards

Standards in America have been heavily criticized over the years but no more than the

past 20 years in our education system. According to Stanford University “The history of

standards-based reform goes back to the educational philosophies of Benjamin Bloom, through

his 1956 work ‘Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.’ In his work, Bloom discusses the

importance of requiring students to develop "higher-order thinking skills," which was a

movement away from rote memorized learning.” We see with this that Bloom’s Taxonomy,

which is where many educators get the idea to categorize their ideas. Further, according to

Vanderbilt University “In 1956, Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward

Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl...[created]The framework elaborated by Bloom and his

collaborators consisted of six major categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application,

Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The categories after Knowledge were presented as ‘skills

and abilities,’ with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting
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these skills and abilities into practice” This allowed our teachers and government to further their

ideas of putting kids into these categories of knowledge. Many people think of Bloom’s

taxonomy as “putting kids into a box” but it's quite the opposite. We are identifying the student’s

strengths and weaknesses in order to further their educational desires. Bloom and his colleagues,

however, predicted the beginning of the American Education system as we know it with their

model. The model that they have uses Direct education (which is another word for lecturing and

minimal student involvement), Indirect education (which is an educational model that involves

activities and more of a student-led classroom) and Cooperative learning (which is when students

and teachers work together to identify the objective and do activities together to inform students

in their educational journey).

To that end, one question we need answered is “where did standards come from?” that can be

answered by Hubbard 2014 when they state:

“It all started in 1983. President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education

released The Nation at Risk Report. When releasing the report, President Ronald Reagan told

the American people, ‘We found that our educational system is in the grip of a crisis caused by

low standards, lack of purpose, ineffective use of resources and a failure to challenge students to

push performance to the boundaries of individual ability and that is to strive for excellence.’”

To further that, Hubbard explains how the Commission on Excellence in Education

created standards to then force School districts to teach a set curriculum to ensure student

success in life. With all of that said, standardized testing, though hated by students and teachers

alike, shows its necessity here and shows the purpose for its creation. According to Reagan

himself, students were failing because of low standards and this created an issue and a further rift
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between students and their peers depending on intelligence level. The article goes further to say

that Oklahoma was the first state to adopt a set of standards called the “Suggested Learner

Outcomes” in the early 1980’s and then in the 1990’s a bill, that became known as the “PASS”

standards, was adopted to create national standards across the board. These standards were

supposed to increase student achievement across the board. (Hubbard 2014)

In 2010 President Barack Obama passed his Common Core standards and, even though it

wasn’t a political power move like many claim, it was heavily politicized and that took away

from the value that these standards have to our children and their educational journey. After that,

states, like Oklahoma and Texas, started changing their standards to reflect the opposite of the

C3 Standards, which were supposed to “align all standards with common core” (Hubbard 2014) I

remember sitting on the couch with my father and him complaining about the new “standards”

that were going to “ruin the country” and I was 10 at the time. Almost 10 years later we now see

these standards being implemented across the country and many pushing for further amendment

to these standards. Further, according to Low and Ashwill 1999:

“The federal government does not determine what students should know and be able to

do in any subject at any level of schooling. Rather, the implementations of standards for students'

performance have been left to state and local authorities. Within the United States, there are

16,000 school districts, each of which is administered and financed by a local community, and 50

state departments of education.”

The federal government is not the end-all be-all of the education system in America, we

see that, at least in 1999, the school system was not based around the federal government’s needs

and wants. To this day, we still see this happening in our schools and I, as a future teacher, have
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put hours of research and interviews of former teachers into this subject of standardized testing

and state standards. My former debate coach even told me that schools are afraid to use networks

like NPR no matter how beneficial they can be for student growth. NPR, though a news station,

has been proven to have credible people come onto their shows, much like Hubbard who was

given several awards for her journalism.

Finally, the Library of Congress put out a “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ) forum on

their website in which they state:

“Over the last two decades, there has been interest in developing federal policies that

focus on student outcomes in elementary and secondary education. Perhaps most prominently,

the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB; P.L. 107-110), which amended

and reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)...”

This is the proverbial icing on the cake, the federal government, though still having a

minor role, has taken a bigger role than they used to in our education system. In our education

system we see the ideas of Bloom’s taxonomy implemented thoroughly and students being

categorized and taught based on those categories. Many will argue that this started under the

Reagan Administration but, to be fully honest, it started many years before under Bloom and his

counterparts.
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How do the standards Mesh for ELA

With all of the history behind us, it still takes one to wonder what these standards are

doing for students in our schools and whether they communicate to each other or not. I am going

to be a future English teacher in the state of Nevada which then leads me to the fact that I wish to

speak about two major standards in the English language Arts (ELA) standards of Nevada.

The first is going to be ninth and tenth grade writing, standard 1A in which it states “

[students will] Introduce precise claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing

claims, and create an organization that establishes clear relationships among claim(s),

counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.” (Ford &Hardman 2010). This standard basically states

that students are to understand how to create a claim, distinguish it from another claim of the

opposing side, and understand the relationship between their claim and that of another side to

their argument. Standard 1A is all about the specific points of writing an argumentative paper.

The second standard I want to focus on is ninth and tenth grade Speaking and Listening,

standard 1 in which it states “[Students will] Initiate and participate effectively in a range of

collaborative discussions (one on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on

grades 9–10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly

and persuasively” Once more, to put this in layman terms, a student is to discuss a topic of

choosing in order to talk about the books and other issues; they will have a conversation relating

to the topic and will build ideas off of one another.

The two standards introduced are from two separate areas of teaching, under the same

ELA branch, and yet they have everything to do with each other. The first standard is meant to

teach them how to have conversations that they may not want to have. The second is about
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teaching them to have those conversations with people around them in order to open up the field

of play a little bit. To further this, the second of the two standards has part D which states:

“[Students will] Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives, summarize points of

agreement and disagreement, and, when warranted, qualify or justify their own views and

understanding and make new connections in light of the evidence and reasoning presented.”

Further, the idea here is that students are to analyze all perspectives of a certain topic and

then discuss it much like they did in the writing standard. These standards inform one another

and feed into the idea that all areas of ELA communicate with one another effectively.
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References

Ford, L., & Hardman, D. (2010). Nevada Academic Content Standards for Ela. Retrieved

November 2, 2021, from

https://doe.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/nde.doe.nv.gov/content/Standards_Instructional_Support/Nevad

a_Academic_Standards/K-12_ELA_Standards_ADA_Accessible.pdf

Hubbard, R. (2014, August 27). Where did education standards come from? Retrieved November

02, 2021, from

https://www.kosu.org/education/2014-08-25/where-did-education-standards-come-from

Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service. American Law Division. (2014). Common

Core State Standards Frequently Asked Questions.

Mcdaniel, R. (1970, June 10). Bloom's taxonomy. Retrieved November 02, 2021, from

https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/

Nerison-Low, R., & Ashwill, M. (1999). Archived: The Educational System in the United States,

case study findings: The development and implementation of education standards in the United

States. Retrieved November 02, 2021, from

https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/USCaseStudy/chapter2.html

University, V. (n/a). History of Standards-Based Reform. Retrieved November 02, 2021, from

https://web.stanford.edu/~hakuta/www/archives/syllabi/CalTex_SBR/historysbr.html
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