Volume 7 Number 1
High Standards for All

 

Oregon Out Front

As the first Northwest state to climb onto the dizzying roller coaster of standards-based education, Oregon offers an early look at the ups and downs of this accelerating reform effort.

John Vingelen, principal, Benson Polytechnic High School

By Catherine Paglin

Grandpa, what benchmark score did you get in second grade?" asks seven-year-old Celia as she leafs through her report on levers, pulleys, and four other simple machines. Celia's report contains a table of contents, the requisite number of discussions and drawings, and a bibliography. Her teacher has marked it 3 — "meets expectations for second grade" — on a scale of 1 to 6.

"What?" says her 79-year-old grandpa, unfamiliar with the terminology. "Oh," he says after it's been explained to him, "I always got the best."

Benchmarks vs. bell curves, standards vs. seat time, proficiency vs. credits. Is it merely jargon that separates the schooling of today's Oregon children from that of their parents and grandparents — or something more profound? Oregon is 10 years into a change to standards-based education, a change that is — depending on whom you ask — exciting, effective, difficult, misguided, sinister, or a just a passing fad.

Oregon's adventure in standards-based education has roots that go back almost three decades. In 1974, the State Board of Education adopted the "Oregon Minimum Standards for Public Schools" to steer schools toward "minimum competencies" that all students must meet. "Almost nobody realizes that Oregon has been pursuing an emphasis on outcomes and accountability since the mid-1970s," says Bob Blum, director of school improvement at the Northwest Laboratory. With the passage in 1991 of HB 3565, the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century, standards once again moved to the forefront. The act established certificates of initial and advanced mastery for higher levels of achievement than those required for a high school diploma, which can be attained with 22 credits of straight D's. In 1995 the legislature refined the act to focus on academic standards in specific content areas and established a three-part assessment system consisting of multiple-choice tests, performance tests for skills such as writing and math problem-solving, and classroom work samples assessed by teachers using state scoring guides.

Today, according to Education Week's indepth report on the standards movement —"Quality Counts 2001" —Oregon is out front, not only among Northwest states but also nationally, in implementing standards and accountability. In fact, only seven states in the nation ranked higher. According to Education Week's analysis, Oregon has clear and specific standards in more core areas and at more grade levels than Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Washington. It has criterion-referenced tests aligned to state standards in more subjects and at more grade levels. It has a greater number of accountability measures such as school report cards and school ratings.

"School districts in Oregon are making good progress because of the state's long-standing commitment to competencies," Blum asserts.

All this change has been accomplished with resources that Education Week, in the same report, graded C-minus for adequacy. "It's like asking to produce a Rolls Royce product on a Yugo budget," says James Sager, president of the Oregon Education Association. Only eight states ranked lower in the funding category.

Rankings and grades, of course, can't measure or express what this ongoing "paradigm shift" means day-to-day for the teachers, students, parents, principals, and state education personnel who are living through it. It doesn't measure how they feel about changes in what and how teachers teach, who teaches what, when they teach it, how student learning is measured, and how schools are judged.

The Oregon standards movement has its advocates and its detractors. Its harshest critics don't cluster at a single point on the political spectrum. In the June 1999 issue of Brainstorm Magazine, Rob Kremer, president of the Oregon Education Coalition, slams the movement's "neo-fascist" origins and the "left-of-center political ideology" of its proponents. The idea of a Certificate of Initial Mastery as a prerequisite to more schooling or a job is "a radical departure from the American concepts of freedom, markets, and individual choice," he writes. Reform based on standards, he says, does not address the true problem with public education — that it is a government monopoly that can only be reformed through competition.

On the other hand, Tim Hardin, a Portland high school English teacher writing in the October 1999 issue of the Berkeley-based magazine Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, argues that the standards trend only increases the "commodification" — turning kids and learning into commodities for the enrichment of business — of social relations already inherent in our educational system. Public education, he argues, provides "the systematic underpinning of capitalist consciousness" by identifying students and their futures with their grades, GPAs, and scores. As an English teacher, Hardin worries about a potential sameness and standardization of student papers, a potential emphasis on form over content, that could arise from teachers evaluating writing using the state scoring guide with its so-called "objective descriptors." But Kremer dislikes such performance tests because the scoring is, in his opinion, not objective at all.

Whether Oregonians support, oppose, or tolerate state education standards, it's likely most do so for nonideological reasons based on personal experience. Many, in fact, remain unaware of the existence of efforts to raise standards. A 2001 survey by the Oregon School Boards Association found that just under 70 percent of 500 registered voters polled were not even familiar with the Oregon Educational Act. This is not surprising considering the results of a recent national poll by Public Agenda, in which just 55 percent of parents — a group one might expect to be more informed about education than voters in general — were aware of their district's attempts to raise standards.

Perhaps because it does not make graduation or promotion contingent on passing scores on state tests, Oregon has not been the site of any highly publicized anti-standards or anti-testing actions such as the recent boycott in Scarsdale, New York, where according to The New York Times, parents kept 67 percent of eighth-graders home during state tests. Oregon does have its activists. "Don't Let the State Experiment on Your Children," reads a page on the Oregon Education Coalition Web site, which then instructs users to "Click here to pull your child from the statewide assessment." However, according to Wayne Neuburger, associate superintendent for assessment and evaluation with the Oregon Department of Education, those exempted because their parents object to testing make up fewer than 1 percent of students.

Views From the Classroom

From one point of view, standards preempt the teacher's authority, narrow what is taught, and interrupt or detract from the "real" curriculum. "The teacher's job is to design their own curriculum," says Clayton Paddison, a sophomore at Benson Polytechnic High School in Portland. "Now they're not doing that anymore. They teach the CIM stuff." Because he and his parents feel there is no value in "what the state wants you to know," he will complete any assignment that receives both a course grade and a CIM score, but will not take any test that is solely for CIM.

Paddison's English teacher, Pat Matteri, has a different take on the same situation. "All of us like choices," she says. "If we told parents, as I try to tell my students, what the choices are, then I think it takes some of the mystique or confusion away. One choice is that every teacher does anything she or he wants in the classroom. Sometimes you'll hit a good one, sometimes not. This (the standards movement) at least gives some equity. There's a base, and then teachers can enrich that and underscore it in their own way."

Matteri, who is responsible for her freshman students producing two work samples and two speeches that meet benchmark, and her sophomores three of each, is enthusiastic about CIM writing standards and plans all her lessons around them. Her students' work is showcased in Benson's front-hall bulletin board under the banner, "Freshmen show off their CIM writing skills by comparing and contrasting Odysseus, a Greek epic hero, to a modern hero." Student choices of a comparison range all over: Harriet Tubman, Mother Teresa, rock star Beck Hanson, Malcolm X. The student comparing Mother Teresa with Odysseus thinks the two wouldn't have gotten along because their personalities and philosophies about killing were so different.

Benson seniors — the first class of graduates to experience the CIM — have lots of complaints:

• "It's kind of like a school uniform. No one can express themselves in it," says Liam Nagy.
• "They teach us to pass the test instead of giving you the well-rounded education that would enable us to pass it anyway," says Lianne Kelley.
• "The teachers don't even understand it. They should teach the teachers," says Jessica Bauer.
• "I think it's too easy," says Zack Cross.
• "When you're focusing on two kids passing the test, the majority of the students aren't getting the attention they need," says Scott Chirgwin.
• "I think a lot of the teachers share our point of view. It's a hassle," says Luke LeTourneux.

Matteri isn't put off by student grumbling about the CIM. She feels it's part of her job to convince them of its value. "When my students read the first pages of Taming of the Shrew, they're going 'Oh my God. What is this?' Do you think I don't have to sell this Elizabethan language to these students of television? Sure I do. So why shouldn't I also have to say there are some goals that we're going to reach?"

Amy Meabe, a language arts teacher at Waluga Junior High School in the Portland suburb of Lake Oswego, finds standards reassuring both professionally and personally. "I like the fact that there's been a group of people who have collectively decided it's important for all 10th-graders to have algebra, it's important for all fifth-graders to be able to write a one- or two-page paper," she says. "I think that's better. As a parent, I don't want my child's teacher just randomly deciding we're going to study nothing but dinosaurs all year. "

Like Matteri, Meabe, who has given teacher workshops on assessment and the CIM around the state, sees standards as bringing equity and priorities to what students are taught school to school, district to district. "Until the state started saying we will assess these other modes, there were high schools in Oregon that taught nothing but expository writing," she says. "There were middle schools that did nothing but narrative writing. There were grade schools that thought you couldn't expect a third-grader to write a persuasive piece. Well, any third-grader worth his salt can tell you 16 reasons why he needs a Nintendo. I think it has really opened a lot of teachers' eyes about what their kids are capable of and broadened what they do in the classroom in a very beneficial way."

Where some see a broadening of curriculum and teaching approaches, others see a narrowing, especially in content areas such as science and social studies. Social studies has been one of the most contentious areas of standards-setting in Oregon. "Which hundred facts of world history are you going to test?" says Sager, pointing to the difficulty of constructing a fair multiple-choice test in this subject. In 1999 a Portland high school social studies teacher publicized questions from a pilot test in protest over the quality of the questions and the idea of multiple-choice testing. A debate ensued, and the state agreed to delay testing for several years. The first social studies tests are now scheduled for 2004.

Social studies teacher Christine Haug-Chin, Meabe's colleague at Waluga, says the advent of standards brought about "a total reshuffling" of the social studies curriculum in the Lake Oswego district. "We had put together a scope and sequence that worked for a lot of us but wasn't necessarily as traditional as some others," she says. The standards forced a change in sequence so that students would be taught U.S. history closer to the time of eighth-grade assessments, even though not all district teachers felt it was the best decision pedagogically. As Haug-Chin notes wryly, "You can't really explain to parents that the kids didn't do well on the test because they're going to get U.S. history next year."

Haug-Chin does, however, like the state writing and speaking assessments. "The things that they put more money into, the authentic assessments, are the ones that so far have the greatest value and I think are bearing the greatest fruit for our kids," she says. But in order to cover benchmark material in social studies, she has reluctantly dropped some projects she valued: studying the pros and cons of a ballot measure, creating a culture based on the resources of a given environment. She finds she works more closely with her department colleagues now. But, perhaps ironically, she does less integration with teachers in other disciplines. That's because the testing tends to measure discrete subject knowledge rather than connections across fields.

Theory Into Practice

Even those who endorse the idea of standards in principle often have criticisms about the way the system works in practice.

"I'm frustrated with some of the bureaucracy," says Astoria High School Principal Larry Lockett. He sees no benefit to students when they're tested in April and the results aren't available until September or October. With such a schedule, his site council doesn't have up-to-date test information on which to base school improvement goals. "If I had a teacher who gave a test and gave feedback even two weeks later I would be furious," he says.

There may have been good reasons, acknowledges Haug-Chin, for the state's recent change to the scoring formula for the writing assessment — doubling points for conventions (grammar, spelling, and punctuation) and not counting toward the final score the points for voice and word choice. But she complains that teachers weren't given time to accommodate that change. Because the number of students meeting standards dropped in many Lake Oswego schools after the change in the formula, she and other teachers were concerned the public would think students were losing ground on the tests. "I don't really mind when they change things, but what we experience is the political ramifications of those changes not being articulated," she says.

Math teacher Mike Kennedy of West Sylvan Middle School in Portland thinks the state math standards are well thought-out, yet doesn't like the idea of how much is riding on some of the tests such as the problem-solving assessment in which students choose one question out of three. "Problem-solving is a good skill to have, but it's not the be-all and end-all," he says. "Who's to say how that student was thinking that day? I have students who are very good in math skills but they are not test-takers."

Testing students on concepts they haven't yet covered in their coursework is another problem. Benson student LeTourneux remembers dropping everything in a sophomore math class in order to study other math — "things that should have been in our next year's class, things that were way over our heads" — in order to prepare for a state test. Haug-Chin, whose husband is a high school math teacher, finds this situation distressing. "How does that feel to a kid who has no way of passing that assessment?" she wonders. "And what does that say to them and the school when they get these horrible scores, and what kind of picture does that paint to the community? I think there's some real political damage that's being done that could be corrected by letting kids take the geometry test after they take geometry."

Parent Frank Esposito was baffled when he received the CIM progress report for his son, who attends C.E. Mason High School in the suburban district of Beaverton. "I thought I was an intelligent person until I received the test results and tried to decipher them," says Esposito, a building contractor. "I spent a lot of time looking at the report, but I still wasn't sure I understood it. It's obvious this reporting system was devised by people involved totally in testing. It doesn't cater to parents who donhave that background. We've talked to other parents and they've just thrown them away."

Fending Off a Backlash

Oregon's system of standards and testing has been changing ever since the passage of HB 3565, mostly in the direction of greater flexibility. "The standards movement in many states, I think, has promoted a backlash by being a fixed bar, almost a pass-fail situation," says Joanne Flint, associate superintendent in the state's Office of Curriculum, Instruction, and Field Services. "We have really struggled to give Oregon a somewhat different take on that." Recent State Board of Education decisions will allow students to work on the CIM, once limited to the 10th-grade year, throughout high school and to work on the CIM and CAM simultaneously.

"We are opening up the process by which students access the CIM and CAM," says State Superintendent of Public Instruction Stan Bunn. Bunn did fail recently, though, to convince the state board to "uncouple" the CIM — in other words, to allow districts to give separate certificates in each academic area, thus rewarding students who meet standards in some areas but not in others. He hasn't given up, however, on some kind of "comprehensive effort to recognize intermediate levels of success," asserting that "the state needs to take a leadership role in that."

State education department staff have high hopes that online testing, which was piloted in 28 schools during the 2000-2001 school year, will eventually address many of the current concerns about standards-based education. The new system (Technology Enhanced Student Assessment), which allows schools to administer tests over the Internet, will expand to 300 schools in 2001 -2002. Because online testing is linked to a testing contractor in Pennsylvania, it requires less onsite oversight. Schools can be more flexible in scheduling testing and can test a transfer student at any time, says Neuburger. "If a kid has a bad day, he can test again," he notes.

Bunn anticipates the Internet testing will answer criticisms about the timeliness of test results, which will be available to students and teachers in a matter of minutes, rather than months. "Then the standards begin to function more as they're meant to function — as feedback criteria," says Flint.

The standards themselves have undergone constant revision based on review by Oregon teachers and several national groups. "We've subjected our standards to fairly rigorous critiquing. That kind of extensive review is unusual," says Flint. Through the review process standards are clarified and streamlined. "Our first target is to reduce them by half," says Flint, who anticipates that eventually standards will number one-third of what they did originally.

More difficult than revising the standards, says Flint, is helping teachers who have been trained that their primary function is to "make sure you've taught everything" to shift their focus to student performance and student learning. "The thing we always underestimate is the length of time it takes to redesign a large institutional system and the amount of retraining or continuing education necessary in that process," she says.

Standards, says Flint, should occupy only a portion of a teacher's attention. Treating standards only as a curriculum — teaching to the test — won't provide the best instruction. "You use them in balance," she says. "That may mean spending a good amount of time on curriculum that ties to student interest, for motivation, and only a small amount will scaffold to the standards."

Haug-Chin is an example of a teacher who uses standards but isn't limited by them. When she evaluates a student's speech, for instance, she scores the final presentation using the state scoring guide. But she also evaluates whether the student's bibliography is formatted correctly, and — because she feels middle school students need structure — she gives points to students for staying on schedule with their research during the three-week preparation process.

"A lot of teachers say, 'These standards on the scoring guide don't capture everything I want to evaluate in my students,'" says Meabe. "They don't understand that they can go beyond it. Making all the components tie together — what you value as a teacher, what your district wants you to be doing, what meets the state standards — it's hard."

CIM in the Real World

As the first Oregon seniors graduated with CIM stickers on their diplomas last spring, they and others are unclear about the CIM's meaning for their futures. "The sticker's there, but what's it going to mean when they get outside?" asks Benson Principal John Vingelen. Like other aspects of Oregon's standards-based education system, that is still taking shape. Thus far, the Oregon University System has incorporated CIM into its admission standards and the legislature has created a scholarship program as a carrot for those who earn the CIM. So far, though, the program is unfunded.

Will students with a CIM have an edge over others in qualifying for jobs? "My mom wants me to get the CIM because she thinks in the future it's going to be real important," says Letourneux. "But now, being one of the first years, to get a job it's not going to be 'Oh, you didn't get your CIM, so you can't work here.' That won't happen for a while, I don't think."

Benson social studies teacher Dave Nelson is skeptical that it will ever happen. "Is an employer going to call down to our school and ask for information?" he asks. "That's kind of the idea, but employers don't operate the same as schools. If we think employers are going to use the records — I don't think so."

The Oregon Business Council has committed to a publicity effort to educate employers about the value of CIM and encourage them to use it in hiring. In the north-coast town of Astoria, the superintendent and high school principal are already working on that, making presentations about the CIM to groups such as the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce. "We've tried real hard to enculturate it in the community," says Principal Lockett. "We've worked with the merchants, asking them to post job applications requiring the CIM certification." In addition, a local foundation has allotted $15,000 in scholarship money to be divided among the 50 Astoria graduates (out of a class of 130) who earned CIMs and are headed for college or other postsecondary education.

The Halfway Point

Does the Oregon standards movement have staying power? With the number of fads teachers have seen, that's difficult for some of them to believe. "If you go back we had goals and objectives and you had some other things and throughout my almost 30 years they all disappeared, they've all been shelved," says Nelson.

Flint believes Oregon is now at the halfway point in its journey to an education system based on standards and accountability. "We've been disadvantaged in not having large amounts of funds. We've been advantaged by the collaborative, pioneer spirit of educators that is characteristic of Oregonians in general," she says.

Flint anticipates that a fuller acceptance of standards-based education will come when the students now experiencing the system become parents. She hopes she's still around at that point so she can stand back and enjoy "the objective view of what has stood the test of time."