State Commission Endorses Higher School Standards

After nearly a year of wearying meetings, focus groups and seven public hearings, a state panel Tuesday endorsed ambitious standards for what California students ought to know in math, reading and writing from kindergarten through graduation.

The standards call for fourth-graders to read half a million words a year outside of class and 10th-graders to essentially have taken two years of algebra, whereas few districts now require even one for graduation.

The long-awaited documents put California out in front of the growing national campaign to raise educational standards, which has been a priority of the Clinton administration and of many states.

In recent years, California schools have lagged behind those elsewhere in student performance on reading and math exams. The poor showing helped prompt the Legislature and Gov. Pete Wilson to form the commission to create “world-class” standards against which to measure the state’s progress.

The standards are intended to guide instruction at all grades. Though they are voluntary, they are expected to have widespread impact because they will eventually serve as the basis for statewide tests.

The 18 members of the state Academic Standards Commission who attended Tuesday’s meeting voted unanimously to send the reading and language arts document to the State Board of Education, which must endorse it before it becomes official. The math standards were the subject of a bitter debate over whether they are demanding and clear enough. But they too were sent on to the state board, with only two no votes and two abstentions.

“We have raised the bar very, very, very high and I think we should be proud of it,” said Judy Codding, a former high school principal from Los Angeles who was a member of the commission’s math subcommittee.

Codding, who is involved in national standards projects, said those recommended by California’s commission in math would be the most rigorous in the nation.

But raising student performance to meet the standards won’t come easily, Codding said. For example, half of California’s high school math teachers--the highest proportion in the nation--did not even minor in math in college.

“Much will have to change if these standards are going to become a reality,” she said. “I don’t think any of us should kid ourselves that this is going to be achieved tomorrow.”

Many if not most of the state’s 1,000 school districts already have standards, some of them more rigorous than those proposed by the panel of educators and business leaders. But they often are of little consequence to schools or students because they are unconnected to advancing from one grade to the next or to job evaluations for principals or teachers.

Taken alone, the voluntary state standards will not change that. But teachers are expected to gear instruction to them so that their classes do well on the still-to-be developed tests that will measure how well students from Calexico to Yreka know the recommended material.

Davis Campbell, executive director of the California School Boards Assn., said the standards are merely a starting point.

“The issue is student achievement, not standards,” Campbell said. “It’s very important we get a major commitment from the state so that all kids have an opportunity to reach the standards. Whether we get that or not is a huge political issue.”

The standards for reading and writing already have drawn national praise and appear to settle the heated debate in California over the importance of learning letter sounds at a young age.

The standards reflect extensive research in the past decade showing that as early as kindergarten, children must be able to understand that words can be broken down into their component sounds--for example, that the word “cat” has three sounds, and that the word changes if “r” is substituted for “c.”

It is skills such as those that were downplayed when the state moved a decade ago toward “whole language,” which assumes that students will learn them naturally by reading interesting stories. But many researchers now believe that teaching those skills directly is essential if students are going to read fluently later on.

The standards also emphasize the value of learning about the structure of English, requiring fourth-graders to delve into the language’s Greek and Latin roots.

Marilyn Adams, a noted Boston-based researcher whose work has documented the importance of phonics in reading, said the new California standards are “by far the best of any state’s that I have ever seen.”

The American Federation of Teachers also praised the standards. But the union recommended adding a reading list to provide examples for teachers and parents of the “quality and complexity” of material that students should be reading.

Commissioners Tuesday debated whether to attach a list of about 20 books for each grade to give teachers, parents and students a better idea of what is expected of them.

Lawrence J. Siskind, one of 12 commissioners appointed by Wilson, argued in favor of assembling a recommended reading list of classics and other literature.

“Parents are starving for guidance here,” he said. “They are looking for alternatives to R.L. Stine,” who writes the popular “Goosebumps” series for children.

But other commissioners argued that such a list would make them vulnerable to activists who would complain about authors from various ethnic groups that might be left off. In the end, the commissioners voted to ask the State Board of Education to compile a core of recommended books.

The discussion of math standards bogged down in a flurry of motions from Bill Evers, a political scientist with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who argued that they were experimental and risky. “What we’ve got here is a group of people who want to radically reform the curriculum and they’re imposing that on the state,” Evers said. “I don’t think we have a warrant from the Legislature to do this, and I don’t think we have any good reason to do it.”

Evers said the standards are “fuzzy” and “goofy,” citing exercises such as requiring first-graders to make a house using triangles, squares and rectangles and second-graders to go for a walk in their neighborhood to find two-dimensional shapes.

He also said the standards downplay the importance of calculation and would do away with traditional math courses that focus, for instance, just on geometry. Instead, that material would be spread out over several years in more general “integrated” math classes covering a variety of topics.

Those issues are expected to come up again when the State Board of Education considers the standards beginning in October.

“There’s a war going on in math and professors of higher education don’t agree with each other and we’re not going to solve that war in our commission,” said panel chairwoman Ellen F. Wright, a former principal from the San Francisco Bay Area. “There are those who think math should be skills-based . . . and others who think it should be almost all conceptual understanding and problem-solving, and we land right in the middle.”

* TESTING PLAN SETBACK: The House voted to deny funding for President Clinton’s national school testing plan. A14

* THE NEW STANDARDS: How statewide tests will relate to the new standards. B2

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What Students Should Know

Proposed standards for California students in each grade level would raise expectations for achievement in reading and writing and in math. Here are two examples:

Reading and writing

Grade 3: * Distinguish between cause and effect, fact and opinion, and main idea and supporting details.

Math

Grade 6: * Calculate percentages and solve problems, such as discounts at sales (10% off), interest earned, a 15% tip.

Source: Academic Standards Commission