Latest News and Comment from Education

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Standards in K-12 Education: A Reader – radical eyes for equity

Standards in K-12 Education: A Reader – radical eyes for equity

Standards in K-12 Education: A Reader


Recently, Gerald Coles confronted the newest round of the Reading War that once again centers phonics instruction. One of Coles’s points is how keeping the education reform gaze on an instructional practice (phonics) allows reform to ignore the more substantial and causal elements surrounding teaching and learning—socio-economic, racial, and gender inequities.
The now four-decades long venture into accountability grounded in standards and high-stakes testing has revealed one paradoxical and often ignored fact: The problems with teaching and learning have almost nothing to do with the presence or quality of high-stakes standards.
Currently, we are seeing a wave of acknowledgements that Common Core now has fallen into that pattern of failure.
The research base on standards has been consistent in showing that the accountability process fails; see below: