Do State Content Standards Make a Difference? An Illustration of the Difficulties of Addressing that Pressing Question

This article discusses the complexities surrounding the relationship between state content standards and student achievement. Drawing on interviews and document analysis, this paper describes one case of how the embedded contexts of state, district, and an individual teacher’s experiences interacted around state content standards in literacy. Student test scores improved, but what led to that improvement is not easily determined. This case reveals that what appears to be an ideal outcome of adopting standards in curriculum planning is really much more complicated, involving district initiatives, curriculum adoption, shifting district demographics, and the individual expertise of teachers

NEPC Review: Waiting for Superman

Directed by Davis Guggenheim, Waiting for Superman offers what appear to be straightforward, commonsense solutions to inequities in schooling. The film argues that heroic action can be taken to fix what it portrays as the disaster of public schooling. The film disregards poverty as a factor in school performance and connection&mdash;and therefore never addresses anti-poverty measures as potential solutions to the problems it identifies. While it raises issues that demand attention, including achievement gaps, high drop-out rates in some schools and districts, and the need for committed, well-prepared teachers, it offers solutions that are simplified, ignore research evidence, and are built on false assumptions.</p

Reading gender/gendered readers: Girls, boys and popular fiction.

This dissertation explores gender issues in children's popular literature and in children's reading and discussion of that literature. Since 1990 over 500 million copies of popular series fiction for children have been sold. Together, these books and their readers offer keen insights into the gendered world of childhood. Focusing on four of the most popular current series---Goosebumps, The Baby-sitters Club, The American Girls and Christopher's sports series---I address the following questions: What visions of boyhood and girlhood are offered by these series? How do children perform their own visions of boyhood and girlhood through their talk and actions around popular reading? To what extent does gender influence children's reading choices? Do children resist the constructions of boyhood and girlhood that they confront in popular fiction? How do race and class intersect with gender both within the texts and in children's responses to them? To investigate these questions, I draw on data that includes fieldnotes of classroom observations, audiotaped individual and group interviews, audiotaped group literature discussions and critical analyses of the texts. The participants in the study are 23 African American fifth grade students from one classroom in which I spent one school year as a participant-observer. Drawing on feminist, poststructuralist and reader-response theories, I examine the role that this literacy practice plays in the developing gender identities of these children and the ways that children negotiate the constructs of femininity and masculinity that they confront in texts. I have concluded that popular series fiction is a powerful tool for revealing and complicating assumptions about the role of gender identities in children's reading and discussions about books. The books display assumptions about gender that often adhere to a dichotomous view of femininity and masculinity. The books also, at times, resist that dichotomy and provide opportunities to deconstruct it. I argue that the gender identities that the children display around their reading of this fiction are not fixed, but rather are multiple and performative. Children position themselves around the texts in ways that both resist and appropriate stereotypical notions of femininity and masculinity and the books can create a context for children and the adults who work with them to complicate and move beyond static notions of girlhood and boyhood.Ph.D.American literatureDevelopmental psychologyEducationLanguage artsLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132339/2/9963773.pd

The Relationship Between State and District Content Standards:Issues of Alignment, Influence and Utility

At the core of standards-based reform are content standards--statements about what students should know and be able to do. Although it is state standards that are the focus of much public attention and consume substantial resources, many local school districts have developed their own content standards in the major subject areas. However, we know very little about the role state standards have played in local standards efforts. In this article we report on a study of the relationship between state and local content standards in reading in four states and districts. Through interviews with key personnel in each state, and district and analyses of state and local content standards in reading, we explored the alignment between state and district content standards, the path of influence between the two, and the role of high-stakes tests in state and districts reform efforts. Our findings suggest that alignment had multiple meanings and that state standards had differential utility to districts, ranging from helpful to benign to nuisance. This wide variability was influenced by the nature of the standards themselves, the state vision of alignment and local control, districts’ own engagement and commitment to professional development, and student performance on high-stakes tests. We explore implications for the future of content standards as the cornerstone of standards-based reform and argue that states must promote district ownership and expand accountability if state content standards are to have any relevance for local efforts to reform teaching and learning

Wixson, Karen K, Elizabeth Dutro, and Ruth G. Athan, The Challenge of Developing Content Standards, pp. 69-107 in Robert E. Floden, ed., Review of Research in Education, 27: 2003. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association, 2004.*

Traces the history of the entire content standards movement, with special attention to the English language arts, both state and national influences