Academic Standards

Academic Standards – Welcome to Section 2 of the Stakeholder Guide to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). This guide provides Parent Center staff and their advocacy partners with an understanding of key provisions in ESSA so they can meaningfully engage with how the law is being planned and implemented by the states. The guide is presented on the CPIR website in several sections (web pages) to improve your quick access to its many topics.

The law requires that the state’s challenging academic content standards in math, reading or language arts, and science apply to

Academic Standards

Public schools and public school students in the state, including students with disabilities. This requirement is critical to ensuring that students with disabilities are provided with special education services and supports designed to enable access to the standards.

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Make sure your state plan clearly articulates the requirement that students with disabilities are expected to be taught the same academic content standards as all other students. Specifically, how will the state ensure that individualized education programs (IEPs) are aligned with state academic content standards for the student’s enrolled degree? Share the November 16, 2015 US Department of Education

Ensure that the state has a plan to communicate the importance of holding students with disabilities to the same state academic content and performance standards as their non-disabled peers.

ESSA allows only one exception to the requirements that both the state’s academic content standards and academic performance standards apply to all students.

Specifically, the state may, through a documented and validated standards-setting process, adopt alternative academic performance standards for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities, provided those standards—

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~is designated in the IEP developed pursuant to section 614(d)(3) of IDEA for each such student as the academic performance standards that will be used for the student; and

~is aligned to ensure that a student who meets the alternative academic performance standards is on track to pursue post-secondary education or employment, consistent with the purpose of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to provide opportunities for individuals with maximize significant disabilities for competitive integrated employment. (Section 1111 (b)(1)(E))

Importantly, ESSA prohibits states from developing or implementing any other alternative academic achievement standards for use in meeting the Act’s requirements (Section 1111 (b)(1)(E)(ii). This provision expressly prevents states from any alternative assessments other than an alternative assessment based on alternative achievement standards developed exclusively for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities, such as the Alternative Assessment on Modified Achievement Standards previously authorized by the US Department of Education in 2005 and revoked in 2015 .

The restriction on alternative academic performance standards is designed to ensure that the vast majority of students with disabilities will be taught and assessed against the academic content standards for their enrolled degree.

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States must also have English language proficiency (ELP) standards (derived from the domains of speaking, listening, reading, and writing) in place for English learners that address the different proficiency levels of English learners and that are aligned with their academic standards. (Section 1111 (b)(2))

Authorship | This guide was produced in partnership between the Center for Parent Information and Resources (CPIR) and The Advocacy Institute under a cooperative agreement of the US Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs. The Parent Information and Resource Center is a project of the Statewide Parent Advocacy Network, Inc. Education experts have long argued for strict state standards on the theory that they will lead to better curriculum and higher student achievement. But in most of the US, literacy standards have only perpetuated confusion about what good curriculum looks like. And students suffered as a result.

Here’s how things were supposed to work, according to the standards-based reform movement that began some thirty years ago: First, states would adopt broad and ambitious descriptions of what students “should know and be able to do” at each grade level. Then education publishers would create detailed curriculum and instructional materials—essentially textbooks that come with teacher guides and other equipment—“matched” to those standards. School districts will then adopt those high-quality materials, and scores on tests aligned with the standards will rise.

Ultimately, that reasoning led to the Common Core—which is not, as many assume, a detailed national curriculum, but rather a set of standards that states can adopt. (At one point, 46 states did.) Even before the Common Core was released in 2010, however, standards advocates pointed to Massachusetts as a model. In the mid-1990s, that state adopted a set of rigorous “curriculum frameworks” in math, English, history and science, in an effort to improve education for all students and narrow test-score gaps between rich and poor.

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Massachusetts now appears at the top of national test score rankings — and even near the top in international rankings. Standards-based reformers have dubbed it the Massachusetts Miracle.

But wait: those test scores are averages, which — given the generally high educational attainment in Massachusetts — include many kids who tend to do well on tests. Massachusetts has one of the largest income-based test-score gaps in the country. And the gap has only grown since the standards were adopted.

Now comes information that sheds light on why. A blogger named Curriculum Dog revealed that many districts in the state use elementary curricula that are rated poorly for their alignment with the Common Core literacy standards, which Massachusetts adopted in 2010. (The state has recently made some changes, but they appear to be minor.)

The same situation prevails across the country: the elementary curricula with the largest market shares are those that receive the lowest ratings. Reading scores remain stagnant, and the gaps between rich and poor have persisted or even widened. Why has the adoption of higher standards not produced the expected results? There are at least three reasons.

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But at the heart of the Common Core is a requirement that all students be able to read and understand text that is appropriately complex for their grade level—not just their individual reading level, which may be years below their grade level. What the standards do not make clear is that teachers must do more than just teach the skills themselves in order for students to meet that requirement. (When I refer to “skills”, I’m only talking about comprehension skills – not ground skills related to decoding words, such as sounds.)

In fact—as stated in some little-noted words that accompany the standards—if teachers don’t build general knowledge, starting in the early grades, students won’t be able to understand sophisticated text, no matter how much assumed skills they had learned. And as reading and math took over the elementary curriculum—thanks to high-stakes testing—students became less and less likely to acquire that kind of knowledge in school. Those lucky enough to have educated parents can usually get it out of school, but the rest fall further behind every year.

From the reformers’ point of view, the publishers behaved like snake oil salesmen, slapping “Common Core-aligned” stickers on the same old textbooks — the ones still widely used in Massachusetts and elsewhere. But it’s possible that publishers read the standards and concluded that all they needed to do was cover the literacy skills listed. (The ratings cited by Curriculum Dog, on the other hand, do not consider curriculum to be aligned unless it builds knowledge and includes complex text.)

The good news is that in the past few years, five or six elementary literacy curricula have been developed that do build students’ knowledge, and more and more districts and schools are adopting them. This is only the first step – teachers must also be trained in this new approach – but it is an important one. And it is possible that we would not have reached this point without the common core.

Tn Academic Standards: Ela By Emily Roland

But it’s also possible that we would have gotten here faster if a different approach had been taken – one that made it clearer that literacy is not just about “skills”. Standards that specified content—such as historical events to be covered—could have helped, though they don’t seem to have done the trick in Massachusetts. The problem may be that standards only have teeth when they are backed up by tests. And standardized testing doesn’t reach into the early elementary years, when it’s easiest to close the gap in knowledge.

A more radical idea is that standards make no difference. Test scores in states with high standards are no better than those in states with mediocre ones. And other countries that outperform the United States on international tests have high standards, just like us. What those countries have that we

Contrary to the lack of evidence on the effectiveness of standards, there is a fair amount of data showing that high-quality curriculum does make a difference to student achievement—and to equity. One large-scale experiment, albeit an unintended one, took place in France. Until 1989, all French schools were required to adhere to a detailed, content-focused curriculum, starting in kindergarten. If a child from a low-income family started preschool at age two, by age ten she would catch up with a highly advantaged child who started at age four—and she would be ahead of a middle-class child which started at age three. However, after France changed its elementary education system to resemble ours, achievement levels generally declined.

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