Colt’s Blog

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From KLCC:

High School Content Standards About To Get ‘Rigorous’

May 21, 2013
By Lucy Ohlsen

Oregon high school seniors of 2014 will be the first required to show three ‘essential skills’ to get their diploma. The subjects have been added one at a time – reading last year, writing this year, and math next.

Willamette High Senior Wesley Butt had a hard time with the writing requirement. It’s usually met with the standardized “OAKS” test.

“I think what was hard was more of the topics. Because I’m more of an imaginative writer. Like, I can’t do narratives about defending stuff against other stuff. But, when it comes to imagination, I can do that easy.”

Butt is in a class started this year at Willamette High School for students that didn’t pass. Teacher Misty Griesi is helping them meet the requirement with writing samples, instead of a test.

“I’m a really bad tester, I’m honest about that one. I’m bad at testing. I fidget and twitch a lot.”

Butt says he’s glad he had to learn how to write, even though his plan right now is to do spray paint art on cars.

“If I didn’t learn some of this stuff now, say I have kids and they ask me something, I would not know how to give them proper grammar or anything, and they’d be talking like me. Not really good or anything.”

Not all schools have a teacher like Ms. Griesi that can dedicate an entire class to passing the requirements. The tests are much less labor intensive than the writing samples.

“We’re talking 80 students, and they had to write an essay every month. Basically I was scoring 160 essays a month for the first semester.”

In addition to the three essential skills requirements, next year is also the first that Oregon will officially follow national ‘common core’ standards.

Video: “For decades, we’ve been debating how to improve schools in the United States. This has been born from a realization that, in an ever-changing world, our students need better knowledge and tools to prepare them to compete in a global economy. In math, science, and reading, our students haven’t been keeping pace with their most advanced international peers.”

This is from a video by the Hunt Institute, explaining common core.

Video: “Thanks to the unprecedented collaboration among states, young people, regardless of their background or where they live , will be taught to standards, that once mastered, will have prepared them for college and career success.”

The standards are extremely long and complicated – laying out broad standards for every subject and grade level. They hope to ensure that students learn on a cohesive path – slowly moving up from addition to algebra, and from reading Clifford to The Great Gatsby.

The goal is for state and national standards to align and overlap, so students are career or college ready. Eventually essential skills and common core will be measured together. Misty Griesi, Wesley Butt’s teacher, says though the changes are stressful, they’re a good thing.

“Our writing scores have gone up just because we’ve changed instruction around meeting the common core standards.”

Griesi says at Willamette, the new standards have made the English department talk more to each other about making sure what they are teaching makes sense as students move through school.

“They’ll use different terminology. And so the kids are like, I don’t know what a draft is. I call it a sloppy copy or something.”

Common core standards don’t even have their own test yet, but there is a worry that with national standardization of content, teachers will end up ‘teaching to a test’.

Griesi’s class could be called “Writing To Pass The Standards”, but she argues that’s not a bad thing.

“I don’t think its necessarily ‘teaching to the test’ that everyone worries about. They’re just skills that they should know in general.”

Andrew Wendt graduated from Thurston High School last year. He didn’t pass the writing test, but he graduated before it was required.

“I feel like I never really learned how to properly write in school. All of the time in school that was put towards math and reading I felt like we didn’t spend a lot of time on writing.”

Wendt wouldn’t get rid of the tests, but he doesn’t think they should be required to graduate.

“I feel like the things that are on the tests are things that CEOs of businesses don’t even know sometimes.  I don’t think that they’re relevant to being successful in life.”

Wendt is now studying engineering at Lane, and he plans to work for a race car engine design company in London.

Future high school graduates have a lot to worry about. Common core, Essential Skills, normal credit requirements. Teachers are facing dwindling funding and new content standards. Students like senior Tabatha De Herrera are powering through anyway.

“My mom, she has five kids, and she’s never seen one of her kids walk at graduation. So I want to be the first out of all of her kids to walk.”

De Herrera was in Misty Griesi’s class, so she’s met the essential skills. She’ll graduate in just a few weeks.