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Notes -
How are proficiency standards determined for K-12 education?
I've tried looking it up a couple of times, after seeing a lot of angst about how less than half of students are proficient in reading or math, and have only found super vague verbiage like "The achievement levels are based on collective judgments about what students should know and be able to do relative to the body of content reflected in each subject-area assessment." That is not helpful at all. I can look at grade level standards to see what they are, and practice tests to see what the state expects that to look like, but it kind of just sounds like some board of people (Department of Ed? State Level? NCLB Commission?) got together and thought about what they wanted, and now every child is measured about that, and every state is panicking all the time about how the actual children aren't living up to it.
But maybe the kids are actually doing very badly? My neighborhood school has less than 50% proficiency, and they're above median for the state. Should I be worried? Did kids do better at some point in the past? When? Are there non BS sources of information about it?
For math specifically: most US states have adopted some version of the standards that were put together by the National Council of Mathematics Teachers and the US National Research Council's "Adding it up: helping children learn mathematics" report. The latter focuses solely on Kindergarden-8th grade, and in my opinion may explain why the NCMT standards are coherent up to 8th grade but lose serious steam in their recommended standards for 9th-12th grade. I have never understood the sense of teaching Algebra 1 for a year, then switching to Geometry for a year, then once the students have forgotten all about algebra switch back to Algebra 2 and spend the first half just recapitulating Algebra 1 for those who utterly forgot it and boring the rest silly.
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