cde academic standards

cde academic standards

Analyzing and Enhancing CDE Academic Standards

1. Introduction to CDE Academic Standards

Having access to clear goals helps teachers make better decisions in the classroom about what instruction, curriculum, and assessment methods will be most effective in their work. Over the last 20 years, academic standards have helped schools in Colorado to make student learning goals more explicit so education can be more effective. Over the last five years, the Colorado Academic Standards have underpinned reforms aiming to enhance Colorado’s educational system. Through legislation, the State Board of Education, and State level committees, these Colorado Academic Standards have been put in place to establish expectations and define the learning goals that should be met by students in grades K-12. Specifically, these standards consist of Reading, Writing, and Communicating; Mathematics; Science; and Social Studies concepts. The following process was used to review the Standards to make them more effective in Colorado schools.

Over the last 20 years, academic standards have helped schools in Colorado to make student learning goals more explicit so education can be more effective in preparing future generations to enter the changing workforce. These Colorado Academic Standards consist of Reading, Writing, and Communicating; Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies concepts. It is important to monitor how well the standards are implemented in Colorado classrooms and analyze how they can be improved over time by refining and enhancing these standards.

2. Current Framework and Implementation

CDE has partnered with the Stupski Foundation in the publication of its publication, Promoting Quality in Early Childhood Education, and developed and is currently writing a guide to educationally based practices titled, A Curriculum Framework for CDE Academic Standards. The Framework, a guide which offers a range of research-based practices from which parents, educators, and communities may select effective and developmentally appropriate resources for children birth through the age of nine, consists of social and emotional learning and development, language and literacy, mathematics, science, social studies, and motor knowledge and skills of children.

The cultural and linguistic development of children is integrated into the Framework. The Framework guides educators to build a foundation of early learning by creating an environment that supports a positive self-concept, maintaining a climate that communicates respect and a sense of belonging to every student, acknowledging and incorporating every student’s family in the community of learners, integrating community resources and coordinating with other programs to promote a healthy approach to children’s behavior and feelings, promoting discussions which support an understanding of the family members’ rights and responsibilities, and employing a variety of instructional strategies to support equal opportunity access to education and which meet the learning needs of all children.

3. Critical Analysis and Areas for Improvement

3.1 Introduction Now that we understand the relationship of external standards to CDE instructor requirements, as well as the details of those requirements, it is time to critically analyze the current CDE instructor requirements. We need to determine whether or not they effectively translate the external standards into something that is relevant and useful. Specifically, we need to evaluate if they can be used as standards for structuring the identification and instruction of a critical mass of potentially capable high-school decision science software developers. When designing programs with the goal of educating these students, it is important to remember that students at this level are fundamentally different from students at the professional school, MBA, and Ph.D. levels. We should use the standard industry definitions of the characteristics of these different groups to ensure that the right students are being taught in the right way at this level. Gathering knowledge about each group of students is essential to ensure the success of the program, as well as the students involved in it.

3.2 Critical Analysis of the MSIS 2006 CDE Academic Standards Many problems observed within business school programs, which consistently claim to provide business skills education, are the result of the confluence of three systemic problems: (1) the uniqueness of the target population, (2) the mission of AACSB as a business school accreditation agency, and (3) intentional and/or unintentional distortion and displacement of educational missions and resources by administrators, faculty, and students. These biases, the nature of industry demand for technical workers with less education, the professional and business training received by each group of workers, the failure to communicate between these groups, and the signature lines of the accreditation standard force scope creep into business programs. This is done in attempts to buy enough time to get non-business students to the business program stage of development.

4. Best Practices and Recommendations

In keeping with the philosophy of college readiness, it is our recommendation, in the strongest terms possible, that all of the discipline-specific academic standards benchmarks should be addressed in only college preparatory courses. It is unreasonable to expect CDE transfer-level courses to be accessible to English learners and students who are offtrack in credits or are not currently enrolled in English or mathematics, and it is arbitrary at best to claim a correlation between passing rates in such courses and college readiness. Rather, such students should be served by district-designed college-preparatory courses and programs. The successful completion of these courses would give them access to the more accomplished college preparatory courses known as either CDE transfer-level or AP. The associated implications for policy, practice, and professional development, such as the need for systematic number tracking and for high school English and mathematics teachers to develop a full and clear understanding of their discipline-specific academic standards in addition to their own, are far-reaching and not inconsiderable.

Increased student access to college preparatory coursework is a crucial foundation for any expansion of standards-based reorganization in the public high schools. Despite ambitious targets set by the state for the Class of 2006, not all high school students are currently on an a-g track, and many currently taking such coursework are not likely to pass. This is because the standards themselves require both college and career readiness of students majoring in that discipline, because of students’ extant cognitive and study skills, or both. If students’ curriculum, instruction, and authentic assessment experiences are pattern-matched to the academic benchmarks of the standards, planned and systematic increases in student readiness would be observed at all points along their high school learning trajectory. These college readiness goals intersect with economic goals for the state, making a-g completion for all students a worthy end point over time. We do not propose that all California high schools offer a-g completion in sequence immediately, but we do propose that such an end point is reasonable and attainable in the long run.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

In this article, we presented an analysis of the academic rigor required among K–12 computer science standards in order to support efforts to scale research-driven teaching and assessment practices. We then analyzed whether the 32 state CS standards that are currently Coast-2-Coast Standards (C2C) met the criteria for having rigorous content and disciplinary practices, the two core components of international benchmarked standards for computer science which have been widely adopted as K–12 standards in many U.S. states. We found that the computer science content was mostly aligned with internationally benchmarked STEM standards in 16 of 32 states, while the academic CS disciplinary practices were aligned with international benchmarked computer science standards in 9 of 32 states. The research findings and analysis presented here are intended to help K–12 CS stakeholders make better decisions about the type of standards and education for computer science that are appropriate for each individual context.

While we acknowledge the limitations of using documents alone to determine standards’ effectiveness, we believe that results and study design offer concrete, data-driven information to be considered by states’ governing bodies and advocacy organizations. We also contribute analysis on the unique needs of new standards and are eager to make this work available for policymakers, curriculum developers, researchers, and CS educators more generally.