
Do Educational Standards Work? - mkempe
http://lisavandamme.com/do-standards-work/
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kaitai
My takeaway:

\- no standards can work, because

\- all standards rely on implementation.

That's a bit disingenuous, but also substantially correct. People game the
system in many ways in response to "standards" (really just
requirements/rules). There's also a sad problem that when minimums are
implemented, many people race to the minimum instead of continuing to perform
at a higher level, because the minimums are what are written down.

Students try to game my assignments too. I try to do two things: make them
"ungameable" or make them so that trying to game them actually gets the
student to do the thing that I think is useful in the first place. But I have
to have the freedom to say, "No, this is a crappy attempt. You can do better.
Go redo this and improve in the following ways," rather than following a
course schedule mandated by the school board. We don't trust teachers to have
professional judgement in the US, so we take away their ability to think. "So
scripted even a janitor could teach it!"
[http://www.brightlightsmallcity.com/reading-horizons-a-
curri...](http://www.brightlightsmallcity.com/reading-horizons-a-curriculum-
even-a-janitor-could-teach/)

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mjevans
Even for physical products this is the wrong goal for success. For physical
products
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continual_improvement_process#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continual_improvement_process#Kaizen)
is a good place to start.

For intelligent creatures, instilling the ability to choose and learn about
new topics at will, to filter bad information from results, and to think
critically about the application of topics is a bare minimum set of tools.
With that background, and a rich library of documentation, it should be
possible to interweave the classical educational aspects in to a cohesive
narrative that teaches history, engineering, math, general science, language
and reports.

School should be a lot more like an expanded version of Connections with James
Burke.

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yummyfajitas
This article doesn't make a lot of sense. The author has discovered that there
are multiple ways of meeting a minimum standard. She then observes that one
way is to exactly meet the standard, and another way is to drastically exceed
it.

Somehow this means they are flawed and can't work.

Are math standards also fundamentally flawed because while the standard may
specify only multiplication of 4 digit numbers, some students can also do
calculus?

