SLOs for a Real Education

Really interesting podcast (first in what is hopefully going to be a series) from Michael Wesch. I'm still processing what I think about the entire podcast (there were certainly parts that made me uncomfortable, which probably means it's something I need to think about more), but I wanted to pull out this quote about what real Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) should look like (about 6:53 mark):

And we have to help them achieve all this within a bureaucratic structure that demands that we frame our goals in a few neat bullet points at the top of our syllabus in a section called: Student Learning Outcomes, often called SLOs. I've never been satisfied with these, they never reflect the complexity or necessity of a real education. If I were to write SLOs for a real education, they might be something like this:

Students will be able to:

1. Ask questions that burn in their soul and take them farther than they ever thought possible.
2. Open themselves up to others and new experiences, to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions.
3. Cross rivers of doubt and conquer mountains of fear to set themselves free.

I think this very nicely identifies the tension between the SLOs we are supposed to write (and achieve) and the ones that really matter. I know there are many that will read the above and completely dismiss them as late-night-college ramblings (which, indeed, they are), but I think we need to take the time to reexamine our "taken-for-granted assumptions".

Yes, there are more specific, down-to-earth learning outcomes for our courses that I think should be part of the discussion, but I think very few of those should be (or even can be) standardized for all students. These "late-night college ramblings", however, are the types of outcomes that I can support being a requirement (or at least a worthy goal) for all of our students.

So I wonder why it is that we shy away from discussions around outcomes such as these, and obsess over measuring how our students do on discrete, isolated skills that very few of them will ever need to actually use. Perhaps it's because we are afraid of what we will discover. As Wesch says (about 49:50 mark):

You can't just think your way into a new way of living; you have to live your way into a new way of thinking.

Teach This, Not That

I think I've made it pretty clear in previous postings that I'm not a fan of standardization, but I realize that most teachers don't have a lot of choice and are required to teach to certain standards. Given that, teachers still often make choices about which standards they cover (since there's never enough time to cover them all) and how in-depth they go on each standard. Since my daughter is currently taking Algebra, I'm helping a home-bound student some with Algebra, and I occasionally teach Algebra myself, I thought I would pick an example from Algebra for my first (and perhaps last) "teach this, not that" post.

I was recently helping that home-bound student with the polynomial unit in Algebra 1. She did some marginally interesting topics, but - since I get to cherry pick for this post - she also did an assignment that I'll excerpt below.

Here's a screenshot of some of the problems she had to do.

And here's a screenshot of the answers.

Later in the semester she'll get to explore exponential functions a bit, so we'll see what types of activities she gets to do for those, but one typical way they could explore exponential growth would be a compound interest type of problem.

Now, every teacher is different, but based on my experience, if an Algebra teacher has to choose one of these two things to cover in an Algebra 1 course, they often pick the first one. Why? Because polynomials seems to "fit" better in the Algebra 1 curriculum and exponential growth does not, and compound interest problems are often presented in a way that it's mostly just plugging numbers into a formula and computing an answer.

From my perspective, however, it should be exactly the opposite. There may be some reason why some people might want to know that a certain polynomial is a quartic trinomial, but I have to think that for most of our students that's not a particularly good use of their time. Compound growth, however, is something that could be life-changing for them and their families (credit cards, car loans, mortgages, savings accounts, investments - and that's just financial applications), yet even when we do teach it, we often teach it as simply "plug-n-chug."

Here are two problems that I think would be interesting for every high school student to explore (and probably most of the high school staff, for that matter).

(Please note that while the math in these examples works no matter what, the feasibility of these scenarios is much more likely in a middle class or higher household. Those happen to be the students I work with, but I understand and empathize with folks who might be frustrated with these examples because they work with students in poverty.)

Scenario 1: Save for your retirement . . . before you graduate from high school.

Many students in my school get a job in high school, often over the summer after their sophomore year. If they work full-time over the course of that summer, they could easily gross $3000. Now, being the teenagers that they are, they are most likely going to want to spend a fair amount of that money. And they should. But I would suggest that by exploring the mathematics a bit, they - and their parents - might also want to invest it.

So, if this were my daughter (we'll see if she chooses to get a job after her sophomore year or not), I'd suggest she invest at least a bit of that money in a Roth IRA. And then I would contribute the rest up to whatever her gross earnings were for the year (we'll say $3000 for this example). Here's why:

1. She won't owe any income tax on that low of earnings, so even though Roth IRA contributions are "after tax" contributions, this would effectively be "no tax" contributions for her, and all earnings will be tax free.
2. I would suggest she invest that money 100% in a low-cost equity index fund, reinvest dividends, and never touch it again until retirement. (No reason not to be 100% in equities for this type of investment and time horizon.)
3. Current assumptions (which I think will change, but we'll go with it), is that a current 16-year old might retire at age 67 or so, so we're looking at a 50-year + investment horizon. What will $3000 grow to in those 50 years? And there's the exponential growth question.

So, what will $3000 grow to in 50 years? Well, to be sure, no one can answer that question, but we can estimate based on a lot of data from past experience. (This is assuming that the way economies and capital markets work will not dramatically change, which I think is perhaps not a good assumption, but for estimating purposes it's the best we've got.) Since 1930, the long term annualized return of the S&P 500 is about 9.7%. If our 16-year old would achieve that kind of return over 50 years, she'd have about $307,000 at retirement. Just from that one summer's investment. If she works after her junior and senior years and puts in an additional $3000 each summer, she'd be looking at over $900,000.

But since we're talking about 50 years, I think we should at least consider investing in riskier equities that - over time - are likely to achieve a higher return. Since 1930 Large Cap Value has returned 11.2%, Small Cap has returned 12.7%, and Small Cap Value has returned 14.4%. Now, most folks would look at that and say that certainly the amount she'd have in the end would be higher, but I'm not sure they'd realize how much higher.

For the $3000 investment, the total after 50 years for Large Cap Value would be over $600,000, for Small Cap would be over $1.1 million, and for Small Cap Value it would be over $2.5 million. For $9000 investment (3 summers), triple those numbers. Keep in mind, that's all tax free, and all with not contributing any money to her retirement account after graduating from high school. (With the assumption that even if tax laws change, they will grandfather in existing accounts.)

Of course now would be a good time to talk with our student about inflation, and how that $7.5 million ($9000 for 50 years in Small Cap Value) in 2067 won't buy the same amount as $7.5 million today. So let's assume an average annual inflation increase of 3.5%. Lots of interesting discussions to have here about how students could use that information to calculate the end result but, simply discounting our returns by that amount turns that $7.5 million into about $1.99 million in today's dollars, which translates to being able to spend about $80,000 a year - (today's dollars) using the 4% rule. Still pretty darn good, which is why I think this is a worthwhile scenario to explore with students and why I think this might be a better use of time than learning about quartic trinomials.

Scenario 2: Don't go to college . . . and retire much earlier.

Yes, it's provocative, but that's part of what makes it interesting. I've written before about our assumption that college is the default goal for our students, but let's look a bit closer at the mathematics.

Like most parents, I've paid attention to the tremendous increase in the cost of attending college. We also started saving for college even before we adopted our daughter, using a tax-advantaged 529 plan. We invested in Colorado's plan because, in addition to earnings and withdrawals being tax free, contributions are exempt from Colorado state taxes (which is like earning 4.63% right off the bat). Due to our diligent saving and investing, and the benefits of compound growth (even with 2008), we have about $120,000 set aside in our 529 for our daughter's college expenses.

Well, that sets up an interesting scenario for a problem about exponential growth. What if she didn't go to college and, instead, invested that money now (we'll take a tax hit since it's not being used for college, but I'm willing to cover that), immediately got a job that didn't require a college degree, and continued to add to that investment over the years? Lots and lots of messy details here, which is why it's such a good problem situation to work through with students, but let's look at a simplified version with lots of assumptions just to get the feel for it.

We'll use the same investment return information from Scenario 1, including investing in index funds with 100% in equities, since she's young and has a long investment horizon. We'll assume that she'll get a job paying at least $25,000 per year to start off with, and that each year she'll get a raise that's at least equal to inflation. We'll also assume that she'll be able to save and invest an additional $3000 each year. I realize that can be tough when she's starting at $25,000 per year, but that works out to a reasonable 12% of her income, and perhaps we'll let her live at home for the four years she would've been in college to help her start off. I'm going to make one more assumption, which is that she could retire comfortably on $40,000 per year. That's for just her, if she gets married she would obviously have additional income, additional investments, and additional expenses that would complicate it a bit; but as a family of three we are currently spending about that much (when you take away what we're saving for retirement), so I don't think it's an outrageous assumption for one person.

Well, the numbers are pretty interesting to play with, especially with the excellent FIRECalc tool. Lots of choices to make here as well, but on the first tab (Start Here) I put in $120,000 portfolio to start, with anticipated spending needs of $40,000 per year (today's dollars), and wanting it to last for 80 years (50 years after she retires). I left the second tab blank, meaning I'm assuming no social security or pension income (there probably would be some, but we'll leave it at 0 for now). On the third tab (Not Retired?), I put in a retirement year of 2045 (so that's assuming working for 30 years, starting now), and that she'll add $3000 to her portfolio each year (adjusted for inflation). For the fourth tab (Spending Models), I chose Bernicke's Reality Retirement Plan. The fifth tab (Portfolio), I adjusted to 100% equities. When I do all that, it gives me this. (You'll have to click submit if you follow that link to see the results page yourself, but here's some of the verbiage):

Following the "Reality Retirement Plan" as described by Ty Bernicke, withdrawals after age 55 are reduced by 2-3% per year until age 76.

Because you indicated a future retirement date (2045), the withdrawals won't start until that year. Your contributions will continue until then. The tested period is 30 years of preretirement plus 50 years of retirement, or 80 years.

FIRECalc looked at the 64 possible 80 year periods in the available data, starting with a portfolio of $120,000 and spending your specified amounts each year thereafter.

Here is how your portfolio would have fared in each of the 64 cycles. The lowest and highest portfolio balance throughout your retirement was $120,000 to $56,587,349, with an average of $15,925,319. (Note: values are in terms of the dollars as of the beginning of the retirement period for each cycle.)

For our purposes, failure means the portfolio was depleted before the end of the 80 years. FIRECalc found that 0 cycles failed, for a success rate of 100.0%.

You really should explore FIRECalc some more but, based on a lot of baked-in (but not half-baked) assumptions, it tells me that for the 64 possible 80 year periods that the historical data supports, not once would she have run out of money (and usually would leave quite an estate). Note that has her retiring at the age of 48 and living until 98. (If you want to change it to constant spending power instead of Bernicke's Reality, then you still have an 81.3% success rate. But working just 3 more years, so retiring at 51, would have had a 100% success rate.) Keep in mind all of this is assuming no pension or social security income, which you definitely would have if you worked for 30+ years. After playing around, you can even discover that she could retire in 2036 - so at age 39 - with a 97% chance of success (and with 59 years of retirement, and usually a sizable estate). So, at an age when some college graduates are still paying off their college loans, she could be retired. Provocative enough?

FIRECalc even lets you download a spreadsheet based on your inputs that you could analyze with students to examine (and perhaps manipulate) the formulas. Again, I would suggest this is not only more interesting than quartic trinomials mathematically, but also practically for students. And, of course, there's nothing preventing our student from doing both Scenario 1 and Scenario 2.

That's just two examples. Lots and lots more you could do with debt (credit cards, car loans, mortgages), governmental policy (budget, entitlements, social security, medicare), and on and on and on. But I don't know anyone that really does, because there's always one more standard we need to cover, and students just might get asked to name a quartic trinomial on some test sometime. It's probably a good thing, though, since we wouldn't want our students to be financially independent and able to retire before we can, would we?

The CSAP is Dead. Long Live the CSAP (err, TCAP)

The Colorado Department of Education just announced the name of the test that will replace the CSAP next year - it will be called the Transitional Colorado Assessment Program (TCAP). It's "transitional" because it's a bridge between the current test and the new test that will be coming in 2014 once our new state standards (based on the Common Core) are fully in place. (I predict it will be called the Colorado Common Core Assessment Program, or C³AP ™.)

No word on whether the TCAP (or the C³AP ™) will, in the words of Will Richardson,

. . . tell us anything about the qualities we most want from our children: a love of learning, a willingness and the patience to grapple with important, real problems, and the ability to make sense of the world as they experience it.

Do You Believe in Algebra?

(Cross-posted on The Huffington Post).

Let me clarify. I'm not asking do you believe in Algebra in the same sense as do you believe in the tooth fairy (full disclosure: I do not). I'll posit that Algebra exists. Rather I'm asking if you believe in Algebra as a separate course/curriculum that we should teach in high school.

After my last post, Dean Shareski wrote a thought-provoking post that asked whether it was possible to offer a customized educational experience in a standards-based system of education.

Our current system and structure fights personalized learning with nearly every new policy and protocol it can generate. The system craves standardization while we desperately need customization. These competing ideals butt heads constantly and for those teachers who do believe in personalizing learning, they live in perpetual frustration. . . In the end, without a restructuring of time and current curriculum requirements the best we can hope for is small pockets of success or the .02 percent of students whose passion happens to be trigonometry or Shakespeare.

Dean later acknowledges, however, that while he wants personalization, he also wants students exposed to a broader range of ideas:

While I'm busy advocating for changes that might support an education that fuels and fosters students' passions, I worry that we lose sight of what a liberal education is all about. They don't know what they don't know. Providing students with broad experiences that invites them to develop a variety of skills, understand and appreciate diverse perspectives and potentially uncover hidden talents and interests speaks to a fairly well accepted purpose of school. . . If we were truly starting education from scratch today, I can't imagine we'd build the same system we have. There would be lots of discussion as to what types of content all students need. Even if core content and skills could be determined, we'd never teach them all as segmented subjects taught in isolation in 45-minute increments.

And therein lies the dilemma - is it possible to provide in a systemic way a customized educational experience for all students that both allows and encourages them to pursue their passions, but also exposes them to the wide range of human endeavors that they may have little or no knowledge about and therefore wouldn't be able to even know if they were passionate about in the first place?

Which brings us back to Algebra. I teach in Colorado, which recently adopted the Common Core State Standards. In general, I believe the Common Core Math Standards (pdf) are much better than most standards that came before them. First, there are fewer of them, with 156 standards for grades 9-12. In addition, 38 of those standards are identified as "advanced" standards, which leaves us with 118 standards for all students spread out over four years of high school, or just under 30 per year. That's much, much more doable then what we had before, and I believe targets much more of what I would consider mathematics that is essential for people to know.

But it still begs the question of whether all students need these 118 standards. For example, do you believe that all students (scratch, that, all people) need to know "there is a complex number i such that i² = -1, and every complex number has the form a + bi with a and b real?" (CCSS, N-CN 1). Or how about "prove the Pythagorean identity sin²(x) + cos²(x) = 1 and use it to find sin(x), cos (x), or tan(x) and the quadrant of the angle?" (CCSS, F-TF 8).

(My not-so-modest proposal is that no state legislature is allowed to require standards that they couldn't demonstrate proficiency on themselves. Since they are clearly successful adults and they are saying that these standards are necessary for all students to be successful, surely they'd be able to demonstrate proficiency by taking the same tests our students do. But I digress.)

As G.V. Ramanathan recently asked in the Washington Post:

How much math do we really need?

In an age of information abundance, when Wolfram Alpha can do pretty much all of high school math quickly and at no charge, do all students need to be able to know all 118 standards? When instructional videos (either homegrown or created by others like Khan Academy) exist that replicate many aspects of a traditional math classroom and allow students to learn the skills at a time and a place of their own choosing, what activities should be taking place in our math classrooms?


Consider these statistics:

1985: 3,800,000 Kindergarten students
1998: 2,810,000 High school graduates
1998: 1,843,000 College freshman
2002: 1,292,000 College graduates (34%)
2002: 150,000 STEM majors (3.9%)
2006: 1,200 PhD's in mathematics (0.03%)

(source: presentation by Steve Leinwand, American Institutes for Research at NCTM Regional Conference in Denver on October 7, 2010. His source U.S. Statistical Abstract)

There's lots we could talk about with those statistics, but I'm just going to focus on what percentage of our students truly need the Common Core Math Standards. I would suggest that it's most likely somewhere between the 3.9% and the 34%, which makes me wonder how "core" they really are. While I think Common Core, combined with replacing Calculus with probability and statistics as the capstone to high school mathematics for most students, would be an improvement on much of what we're currently doing, I'm still not sure whether teaching Algebra as a separate course is the best way to accomplish it - even for that small subset of our student population that is passionate about math and science.






Can we find a way to have students whose passion is math and science explore rich, meaningful mathematics that isn't divided up into courses (Algebra), semesters (first semester linear, second semester non-linear), and units (Chapter 5: Writing Linear Equations)? Can we do this in a meaningful way for all students, even those who currently don't have a passion for math and science? Can we do it in a mathematically coherent way that doesn't impact a student's ability to progress to higher-level mathematical thinking should they choose to do that? Can we do this within a system that - at its heart - is an assembly-line model designed to mass produce a fairly standard product?

I think this is essentially what Dean - and many of us - are asking ourselves. Is there a way to combine the best of both? The best of passion-based learning and a liberal arts education that exposes students to some "standard" body of knowledge that we believe all people should be exposed to. Can the current system - with all its flaws and all its successes - adapt to a personalized, on-demand, anytime, anywhere learning environment? Or do we have to start over with a system that is designed to meet the needs of the learner and one that - at its heart - is antithetical to a standards-based system?

I honestly don't know. Because while I do believe the current system is designed to meet the needs of a rather small portion of our students, I'm not sure I can clearly define what mathematics education would look like in such a new system. As I stated in a previous post, I believe we can have high standards without standardization, yet like Dean I struggle to envision exactly what that looks like in practice in any kind of systemic way.

So, do you believe in Algebra as a separate course/body of study in high school? Or, like the tooth fairy, is Algebra - and standards-based, one-size-fits-all education - something we should've outgrown by now?

What Should Students Know and Be Able To Do?

(Cross-posted at The Huffington Post.)

I'm a teacher. A parent. A citizen. Those are the lenses I view teaching and learning, educators and students, education and school through. That doesn't make me an expert, and I don't have all the answers, but I think I have some good questions, so let's get started with one of those questions.

This is the question that educators are constantly asking themselves.

What should students know and be able to do?

It gets back to an old argument in education, the argument about which is more important -- content or skills. Like most teachers I've talked with, I think that's a false dichotomy. I want both. I want students to know some content and have the skills to be able to use their knowledge. I don't want them to just "cover" the material, I want them to uncover their own understanding, and to think critically about the content.

My bias, however, is that too often in schools we err too much on the side of content. I once heard Cris Tovani, a wonderful reading teacher in Colorado, say,

Yeah, as a teacher I can cover my curriculum. I can get to that finish line. But often when I get to that finish line and look around, I'm all by myself.

That's even more true today, when we live in a rapidly changing, information abundant world. We live in exponential times. There's just too much content out there. As Eric Hoffer said,

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

He said that more than thirty years ago, and I think most of us would agree that the pace of change has only increased since then.

Schools were designed for an age when information was scarce, when students came to school because that's where the information was. It was in the textbook, it was in the teacher's head, and -- if they were lucky and had a good library -- it was in the additional resources the school library provided. But now, now we live in an information abundant world. I don't hear many people complaining that they don't have enough information (although they may complain about the quality of that information), yet schools are still designed around the concept that this is where you go to get information. That needs to change.

Which leads, I think, to an even more basic question. A question I think that, despite all the education reform lately, we haven't really talked much about.

What's the purpose of school? Is the primary purpose of school to meet the needs of society, or to meet the needs of the students?

There's a strong argument to be made that since society is investing so many resources into educating the young, that schools should be designed to meet the needs of society. After all, if schools don't meet the needs of society, why should society support them? This is the argument that is currently in fashion.

But I'd like to suggest an alternative, that the primary purpose of school should be to meet the needs of the individual. That if we meet the individual needs of students, we will ultimately meet the needs of all students. And if we truly meet the needs of all students, we will then meet the needs of society. I think this has always been the case, but it's even more important in a rapidly changing, information abundant world, a world where society doesn't even know what its needs are going to be in five years, much less in thirteen (for K-12 education) or longer (if you include post-secondary education).

This is a problem for many of the current school reform discussions because, despite the rhetoric about leaving no child behind and racing to the top, they rely on a standardized view of success, a one size fits all approach. I think individual students are different, and to ignore that fact is to deny the evidence that is all around us, at least if you ever met more than one kid.

No, I'm not talking about lowering expectations. I think we can have high standards without being standardized. Standardized curricula create standardized minds. Standardized minds create collateral debt obligations and credit default swaps. You know all those folks on Wall Street aced their standardized tests. They were the best and the brightest, the success stories from our schools, at least by our current definition of success in schools. Yet clearly there must be more to success than just those test scores.

So, I would suggest we need to slightly modify the question we ask ourselves as educators. Instead, perhaps we should be asking,

What should this student know and be able to do?

I think the addition of just one word might just make all the difference.

What’s Core?

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a joint effort by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in partnership with Achieve, ACT and the College Board. Governors and state commissioners of education from across the country committed to joining a state-led process to develop a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12.

As Tom Hoffman points out, we really need to take a closer look at the draft standards. Why? Here are his Top 10 Reasons:

1. Your state has probably already committed to using them.
2. The federal Department of Education is exerting heavy pressure on states to adopt the Common Standards.
3. An impressive and powerful list of partners and supporters are backing the Common Standards initiative.
4. These "college- and career-ready" standards, if implemented, will become the basis of all subsequent K-12 English Language Arts standards.
5. These standards, if implemented, will become the basis of all subsequent K-12 English Language Arts curriculum and assessments.
6. The results of those assessments will, if implemented, be used to evaluate not just schools and students, but the performance of individual teachers.
7. The creation of data systems to attach test scores to individual teachers is a basic requirement for federal Race to the Top grants and a top priority for the federal Department of Education and other powerful interests.
   
   But . . .
   
   
8. The Common Core State Standards Initiative English Language Arts Standards are not actually English Language Arts standards.
9. The Common Standards for English Language Arts are narrower, lower, and shallower than the Language Arts standards of high performing countries.
10. We are inviting testing companies to determine the future of our schools with virtually no accountability or public input.

Tom expands on these in his post, please go read it now. Tom’s also written many other posts about this (too many to link), so visit his blog and scroll down. Other folks have recently written about this, including Bud Hunt, Chris Lehmann, and David Warlick.

Now, since most if not all of those folks used to teach Language Arts, I’m not sure if I have much to add to their perspective. Instead, let me throw out some questions from a non-Language Arts teacher perspective. As always, I’m just thinking out loud here.

1. What’s Core?
   
   People use different buzzwords – some use core, some use essential learnings, your school or district may use something else, but I think this is a critical question for all of us. Tom is very concerned that these standards are too narrow and shallow and are not reflective of the fact that English Language Arts is a discipline. On the one hand, I agree with him. If you just read the list of standards in isolation, they do appear to be somewhat shallow, and I worry that the following observation from Tom might be accurate:
   

   the obvious interpretation is that they chose to define the standard as "support or challenge assertions" rather than "construct a response or interpretation," as every international example they cited did, because the former is much easier and cheaper to score reliably on a standardized test.

   When I explore the full document (pdf), I do feel a little bit better based on the examples they give, but certainly Tom makes his case that other international standards seem to go much deeper, and that it’s possible these standards are being tailored in a way that makes them easily assessed on a standardized instrument.
   
   But, on the other hand (and yes, I know, I always seem to have a lot of hands on hand), I worry about Tom’s suggestion to add more and more levels of detail into these standards. Because this runs into my own personal dilemma with standards, that in some respects they are too comprehensive, too overwhelming, too restrictive, and perhaps not wholly necessary.
   
   This is a real struggle for me, because I do think that students around the world need many of these skills, and much of this content, yet I can’t help but think that we all are so in love with our content areas that we lose sight of what’s truly essential. I say this from the perspective of a parent of a nine-and-a half-year old who wonders if “literacy criticism” or “the concept of genre” are essential. They may be, I’m not sure. But I can’t help but think of that study a few years back (sorry, can’t find a link at the moment) that indicated it would take something like 26 years to “cover” all the various standards in place at that time (and we have more now). Is this what education – and life – is supposed to be about? It just seems to me that, somehow, some way, what’s essential, what’s really core, should be a much shorter list.
   
   
2. Malleable or Inflexible?
   
   Chris makes a good point about national testing and the resultant depersonalization:
   

   Once there is a national curriculum and a national test, we will see a further blurring of the line between "education" and "training" where kids are given online instruction and online assessment that can be delivered to any student, regardless of geography.
   
   . . . It has the risk of the ultimate deprofessionalization of teachers and depersonalization of education.

   
   And the NCTE’s Definition of 21st Century Literacies state that
   

   These literacies . . . are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.

   So the literacies are malleable, yet standards are fixed and inflexible? We want all kids to flourish and live up to their individual potential, yet we’re going to achieve that by standardization? How do these things coexist?
   
   
3. Necessary, but not Sufficient?
   
   While the full pdf includes more examples that take this into account, the list of standards themselves seem to ignore the current technological world we live in. Only three of the standards (Reading #12 and #13, and Writing #12) seem to even come close to acknowledging that we live in a rapidly changing, technologically enabled, globally connected - and interconnected – world. These standards could’ve been written fifty years ago. That doesn’t make them bad, as many of these abilities are certainly still necessary, but are they sufficient?
   
   These standards don’t seem to address that reading, writing, speaking and listening are all very, very, very (did I mention very?) different in our current world than they were one hundred, fifty, twenty or even ten years ago. Yes, many of the standards apply in our world today, but I still don’t think that fully addresses how we read, write, speak and listen in a read/write, always on, always connected, participatory world.
   
   I think their definition of text is way too narrow, and way too limited. While one would hope that the more complete document would be taken into account, I could easily see the assessments targeted solely at the stripped down standards. Which then would mean instruction would be targeted only at the stripped down standards. Which then would mean our students would be perfectly prepared to graduate high school . . . in 1985.

So, as Bud points out:

The validation committee’s pretty light on language artists.

I would add that the workgroup that developed the standards also seemed to be pretty light on actual practitioners, although testing companies were well represented. In fairness, the NGA points out in the FAQ (pdf) that teachers were consulted:

NGA and CCSSO have asked for and received feedback from national organizations representing educators, such as the National Education Association (NEA), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). These organizations each brought together groups of teachers to provide specific, constructive feedback on the standards. The feedback was used to inform the public draft of the college- and career-readiness standards. Numerous teacher organizations are also involved with the initiative through the National Policy Forum, which provides a means to share ideas, gather input, and inform the common core state standards initiative.

I would strongly suggest that you take some time to review the standards and some of the thoughtful posts about them, and then provide your feedback. Particularly if you’re a Language Arts teacher, but even if you’re not because, as Tom points out, as they are currently worded all teachers will be responsible – and held accountable – for students meeting these standards. And, as he points out in another post, it appears as though the end goal just might be high school graduation requirements.

Where can you provide some feedback? NCTE has issued a statement and is soliciting feedback, and you can provide feedback directly to the validation committee by October 21st. If you’re a member of NEA or AFT, you might also consider letting them know what you like or dislike about these draft standards.