Learning Standards Proposed for Schools

Joining the nationwide rush to set education benchmarks, a panel of Los Angeles educators proposed Thursday the first citywide learning standards for history, science, English and math.

The 154 standards are essentially guidelines for what Los Angeles Unified School District students should know at different grades. For instance, students should be able to make scientific observations about weather by the end of the fourth grade. By the end of high school, they should be able to describe and predict chemical reactions.

“It’s really dynamite,” said school board member Jeff Horton, who heads the committee that reviewed the proposal Thursday. “I can imagine a day when we will be encouraging all teachers to look at these with their students at the start of every year.”

But some outside observers were skeptical that the standards would have much impact on the 650,000-pupil district because they are not directly tied to a student’s advancement to the next grade level or to graduation.

A third-grader who does not meet the new standards of reading fluently or writing a simple paragraph would probably still move on to fourth grade. A senior who did not know metric measurements, algebra and geometry could nonetheless earn a high school diploma.

The standards, developed over the past six years by a districtwide task force, will receive their first major public hearing before the full Los Angeles Unified school board Monday and are expected to be approved in mid-July.

Pressure to improve the quality of public schools has spurred frenetic activity at national, state and local levels to develop standards for what all students should know and be able to do in the major academic areas.

“There’s no doubt that standards are a hot issue; they may be the hot issue,” said Mike Porter, a spokesman with the Education Commission of the States--an education policy group in Colorado. “But even though people are rushing into standards, how good are those standards, really?”

Some other large school systems are adopting tougher standards and making them stick. New York has created a high school exit exam based on their new standards, he said.

Los Angeles Unified administrators said they chose not to make the measurements binding yet, preferring to try remediation for students who do not meet the marks and rewards such as certificates for those who do.

They also pointed out that the standards, if adopted by the school board, are at the core of a broader effort to raise student achievement that does include a number of checks and balances.

The standards will form the basis for classroom lesson plans now being developed, which are to be disseminated and expanded this year with $4.1 million earmarked for teacher, staff and parent training. They also are linked to achievement tests now being tried at some schools, which the district will introduce districtwide during the coming school year at a cost of $895,000.

Results of those exams will be used to gauge the effectiveness of individual schools, programs, and, perhaps in the future, individual teachers.

“This means there will be a kind of thermometer, a measuring stick,” said Day Higuchi, president-elect of the United Teachers-Los Angeles union, which was actively involved in the local standards movement from its inception.

Joan Evans, the district director in charge of the standards project, said she expects teachers to embrace the standards because they helped develop them and will continue to help refine them.

“In the past, the only message for teachers was “Thou shalt,’--somebody standing up and telling them how to teach,” Evans said. “This is going to be all about looking at students’ work together, seeing what they need to meet those standards.”

School reform experts say that most standards produced so far are too vague to help educators and the public understand what students should be learning. A recent study by the American Federation of Teachers found that only 13 states had produced standards that are clear and precise enough to set course content and drive other reforms, such as the development of reliable assessments.

As an example of a good standard, the study cited one written for high school history that says all students should be able to describe how federalism was transformed during the Great Depression by the policies of the New Deal. As an example of a weak standard, it cited one that only asked that students be able to “understand, analyze and interpret historical events, trends and issues.”

Los Angeles Unified’s new standards fall somewhere in between those examples, with the most specific history example asking high school seniors to: “Apply the principles . . . embodied in the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights to contemporary and historical issues.”

Times education writer Elaine Woo contributed to this story.