Educators Get Look At Graduation Standards But State Officials Have No Plan To Assess Those Standards
It’s not just what students learn that’s important, it’s how you determine whether they’ve learned it.
That was the message sent to the state’s top education officials Monday night during a public presentation of the first draft of the Idaho high school graduation standards.
“I disagree with the process of coming up with the standards without having some idea of assessment,” said Nick Hoffman, science coordinator for the Wallace School District. “I don’t think you can write 4,000 standards and not have a plan how to do the testing.”
If the standards are approved by the Idaho Legislature next year, all ninth- through 12th-graders in the state’s public schools would have to meet the benchmarks in health, language arts/communication, math, science and social studies. But state officials have yet to decide how to assess those standards or how to hold school districts accountable for meeting them.
Local school districts would have to meet the standards to retain their state accreditation, but could also push the benchmarks higher if they choose, said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Anne Fox.
“The thing that’s exciting is you’re talking about raising the bar when there wasn’t any bar before,” Fox said. “We’re establishing a level now.”
About 35 parents, educators and school administrators attended the meeting at Coeur d’Alene High School, the seventh of eight public hearings around the state on the 53-page document.
Some, including Fox, praised the inclusion of a “minority report” in the science exiting standards which supports the teaching of creationism.
The report says in part, “If we throw out the evidence that a creator is involved then we have declared evolution a fact by default, regardless of the evidence … It appears that evolution supporters are a little short on scientific evidence, and a little long on authoritarianism.”
The Post Falls School District rejected a plan last month to teach creationism along with evolution in its schools.
Edward Fisk, superintendent of the Moscow School District, said the standards should be more specific.
“The draft is very rough,” Fisk said. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. We need to begin to define where in the curriculum some of this learning is to take place.”
The 135 educators, parents and community representatives on the graduation standards committees will meet Aug. 12-13 in Boise to review the public comments on the draft. They will prepare a second draft of the exiting standards to be presented in public hearings in September and October.
A third draft of the report is expected to be completed later in October. It will be presented to the State Board of Education in November and to the Legislature in January or February.
A copy of the first draft of the high school exiting standards is available at some libraries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sde.state.id.us/osbe/board.htm.