Senate Bill 1, passed with overwhelming support in the 2017 Kentucky General Assembly, directs the Kentucky Department of Education to begin a process of reviewing and updating the state's education standards. Over a six-year period, committees made up of content area and grade-level teachers and higher education representatives will review the standards, gather input from across the state, and generate recommended revisions to ultimately be approved by the Kentucky Board of Education.
This process will begin in 2017-2018 focusing on English/Language Arts (ELA) and Math standards. Two years ago a process took place to review standards in these areas, and those recommendations will serve as a starting point for the new review protocol outlined under SB 1. The recommended revisions for each area are available for public feedback here and here.
I do not have content area expertise in either ELA or mathematics, and so as a member of the state board I will rely heavily on the recommendations of teachers in both areas (and I want to emphasize that what follows are my individual perspectives only and not those of the state board in general or anyone affiliated with Western Kentucky University, where I work). However, I've grown deeply concerned about a shift that has taken place in reading instruction in recent years and the impact I think that shift has had on students of poverty. Specifically, I believe that an over-emphasis on reading as a skill has caused schools to neglect social studies, science, and arts in early grades, ultimately depriving many students of the domain-specific knowledge they need for reading comprehension and academic success in later grades (see numerous links laying out my thinking on this topic at the end of this post).
I'd like to see the ELA review committee give serious consideration to this trend, and how changes in standards might encourage schools to shift their attention back to a rich, content-laden curriculum for the early grades.
I would strongly recommend that standards review committee members spend some time with E. D. Hirsch's latest book, Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories (see my reviews of this book here and here), and, to a lesser extent, Daisy Christodoulou's Seven Myths About Education (review here). Hirsch argues that, while student decoding skills have improved in recent years thanks to a much heavier emphasis on reading instruction and intervention, that improvement has not translated into higher proficiency rates in later grades, especial in other subject areas. Hirsch believes this is because, in response to skills-driven state and Common Core standards, elementary teachers have begun to spend excessive amounts of time trying to teach students "transferable" reading skills like finding the main idea in a passage, leaving behind any meaningful time devoted to subject areas like social studies, science, the arts, and substantive literature.
Hirsch argues there is no such thing as a generic skill for finding the main idea in a passage. Citing research summarized by Daniel Willingham, he says that such generic skills can be effectively taught in as little as ten lessons, at which point instructional time should shift toward teaching students the domain-specific content knowledge they need to actually understand complex reading passages in later grades. Hirsch founded the Core Knowledge organization to promote a specific, grade-by-grade curricula to deliver such content.
My own review of Kentucky's academic standards showed that our ELA standards don't differ that much from Hirsch's Core Knowledge Sequence, except in their specificity at each grade level. But the biggest difference is in social studies and science, where Kentucky doesn't describe grade specific learning standards for grades K-3 at all [updated clarification: Kentucky's science standards are grouped in bands by K-2, 3-5, etc. but n0t individual grades]. In a presentation last year to the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, Robert Pondiscio and Lisa Hansel from the Knowledge Matters campaign argued in favor of early grades state standards in the content areas that would do just that, creating an opportunity for more instructionally valid reading tests based on the actual domain-specific knowledge students have been studying.
I'd like to see all of these topics considered in Kentucky's upcoming standards review process. Proposed changes in our school accountability system might include a component holding schools more accountable for devoting more instructional time to content areas in grades K-3. I would like to see the committees charged with revising social studies, science, and arts standards consider articulating specific content standards for the same grades. But to provide teachers the flexibility and time to actually teach curricula aligned these standards, we should also consider whether Kentucky's ELA standards should be pared down, especially in these skills-related areas like finding the main idea of a passage.
I am eager for more reading and early grades teachers to weigh in on this dimension of the standards review process, and look forward to the discussion.
Update, 6/30/17: Here's a thoughtful piece by reading Timothy Shanahan arguing that reading and content knowledge instruction should support each other.
Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member) or Western Kentucky University (where I serve as associate professor in the Department of Educational Administration, Leadership, and Research).
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