Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Standards sought in interstate learning
ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times
Thirty graduates of North Cross School in Roanoke County participated in the school's 46th commencement ceremony Monday morning. The newest alumni threw their hats in the air after being declared graduates.
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As thousands of the region's high school seniors are getting ready to graduate in the weeks ahead, some researchers and advocates are questioning the value of the American high school diploma and are looking for ways to make it more rigorous.
American education has traditionally been fragmented along state lines, with state governments determining how much students should have mastered in each grade. States end up with different standards, which means that a high school diploma in some states may be more difficult to achieve than in others.
Two groups of policymakers are now working on a common set of standards for grades kindergarten to 12. The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers on Monday rolled out an initiative designed to put together common standards in English and math for each grade level. So far, 46 states and the District of Columbia have signed on, including Virginia.
The goal is to make sure that students graduating from high school are ready for college or a job.
A committee of experts will work throughout the summer and the fall to put together grade-by-grade standards. Individual states will then be able to review and, possibly, to adopt the standards. In many cases, the new standards will be higher than existing ones, meaning that, if adopted, school is likely to get tougher.
But the new standards would also make American students more competitive against their peers overseas, said Dane Linn, director of the education division at the NGA.
"We need to make sure we have fewer standards. We need to make them clearer, and we need to make them more rigorous," he said. "When it comes time for adoption, they'll have a general sense of whether or not their standards match up."
Nationwide academic standards have been a topic of discussion for years, but advocates have found that it's not easy to corral different states into a single set of expectations for students.
Virginia education officials have welcomed the initiative but would not commit to changing the state's standards.
"Participating doesn't bind a state," said Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education. "Under the state Constitution, it's the state board of education that adopts standards for the public schools."
Virginia is committed to its own Standards of Learning process, he added.
This is not the first time the NGA has tried to put in place a uniform way of assessing education. In 2005, under the direction of then-Gov. Mark Warner, the group called on states to settle on a single way to calculate graduation rates to allow better comparisons across states.
Over the years, states have started to adopt the NGA's recommendation, and today about 18 states, including Virginia, use the "cohort" method to calculate graduation rates. Under the cohort method, states assign each entering ninth-grade student a number, then track that student over four years to see whether the student graduated, dropped out or transferred.
