Verdict Is In: The Final Draft of Indiana Proposed Standards Stink
Ok some folks are now weighing in on the final draft of Indiana’s proposed academic standardsthat was released earlier this week.
Dr. Terrence Moore of Hillsdale College needs to let loose and tell us how he really feels about the ELA standards, don’t hold back! No, just kidding, he writes a no-holds-barred review, and doesn’t give the standards good marks. An excerpt:
This absurd incongruity is one of the leading characteristics of the supposedly new Indiana English standards. We are invited to be overjoyed as we skip down the Yellow Brick Road to College and Career Readiness, preparing our children for a Twenty-First-Century Global Economy by putting them behind computers and by having them act out “assigned roles” for “small group discussions and projects” (as though project-based learning has not been tried and failed over these last forty years). Meanwhile, we have children being introduced to the word night in fourth grade, and we utterly fail to teach even the letter A properly.
The math standards still have fuzzy math.
The new draft begins with a preamble before the standards are listed claiming that the standards are not instructional practices: “The educators and subject matter experts that have worked on the standards have taken care to ensure the standards are free from embedded pedagogy and instructional practices.” This statement couldn’t be further from the truth and those who cut and pasted these standards know it. They simply don’t care because it is the type of pedagogy they prefer – parents and experts be damned.The IDOE and Pence’s CECI were duly warned that Draft 2 contained pedagogy by Dr. James Milgram, the national expert they hired to help review the standards. Unfortunately, it seems theIDOE and CECI ignored Milgram’s recommendations, and contrary toVerdict Is In: The Final Draft of Indiana Proposed Standards Stink | Truth in American Education: