Mission Strategy is Sound and Proper

The current strategy for accomplishing the mission of Education - teaching a finite list of Knowledge/Skill items to a continuous pipeline of incoming Students - is simple and sound.

1. Define Course Standards with the list of Knowledge/Skill items to be learned in each Course
2. Teachers develop Classroom Curriculum for the Knowledge/Skill items list for their Courses
3. Teacher use their Classroom Curriculum and perform Education Cycles (Teach/Assess/Remediate) to ensure the Students have learned the Knowledge/Skill Items

State Standards do NOT completely drive Classroom Curriculum

There is a problem going from Step 1 to Step 2 - there are crippling issues with current Standards, as they typically are not simple lists of discrete Knowledge/Skills items to be taught that Teachers can easily use to develop Curriculum.

• Most Standards are too high-level, causing Teachers to have to disaggregate compound items or worse, Teachers have to try to interpret exactly which Knowledge/Skill items under a high-level topic area are to be taught
  • Not only does this place an undue burden on Teachers, but by having each Teacher do it individually, it multiplies the work to be done by the number of Teachers, and it causes there to be as many different interpretations of the Standards as there are Teachers!
• Standards, while being "content lite" (lacking discrete Knowledge/Skills), are also often overwhelming in size due to the inclusion of vast amounts of "supplemental knowledge" - examples, definitions, explanations, prerequisites, etc. that are better off taken out of the Standards and stored in a separate Knowledge Library (albeit linked to Standards for easy referencing) - making it even more difficult for Teachers to tease out the simple list of discrete Knowledge/Skill items to be taught.
• Teachers admit that Standards are not the sole or even primary source driving the development of their Classroom Curriculum today - due to the pressure on Teachers for their Students to perform well on high stakes EOY Assessments and the readily available past Assessment questions, it becomes easier for Teachers to examine these questions and reverse engineer what is to be taught - Teaching to the Test!
  • Even if this is easier than interpreting the Standards, it is not an easy task, and again, because it is performed by each Teacher, the work is multiplied by the number of Teachers instead of being done once, and the number of interpretations of what to teach is equal to the number of Teachers
• The Education System is Flowing in Reverse!