Raising of school standards puts teachers, students to new test

Third-grader Blake Montoya narrowed her eyes and focused intently on her science experiment: a penny, a playing card and a paper cup.

"When I hit the card, the penny usually drops straight down in the glass because gravity pulls it in," the 8-year-old explained later. "Science gets easy, but sometimes it gets hard."

Next year, science -- and math and English -- are going to get even harder for Blake and students around the state.

One year and $500,000 later, Nevada's council on academic standards has released 246 pages of topics in English, math and science that teachers statewide are required to cover, beginning next year.

The result: Nevada will be more academically competitive with other states, but schoolwork at every grade level will be more difficult, officials say. Ultimately, the new standards will make it harder to graduate.

For instance, here is what students will have to do:

* By the end of the third grade understand that forces cause objects to change direction or speed.

* By the end of the eighth grade be able to analyze story elements such as character, plot or climax to determine their importance in a story.

* By the end of the 12th grade be able to solve practical problems using properties of geometric figures such as the Pythagorean Theorem and right-triangle trigonometry.

Critics say the standards are too rigid and cannot be universally applied to students in a diverse district such as Clark County, home to 203,000 kids with a wide variety of interests and abilities.

But officials who created the new standards are hailing them as ground-breaking. Ultimately, students will be better prepared for college and work, they say.

And officials add that Nevada teachers have never had a comprehensive blueprint that describes what they are supposed to teach.

"This is the law now. This is regulation," said Debbie Smith, a state PTA leader and the chairwoman of the state's standards council. "We haven't had anything as comprehensive as this before."

Lawmakers in 1997, heeding some public cries for better schools and more school accountability, created the nine-member Council to Establish Academic Standards and charged the panel with drawing up statewide standards.

Officials say that until now teachers have followed district curriculum guidelines, but teaching has varied from school to school and district to district. In a transient county such as Clark, that meant a student who bounced from school to school rarely experienced seamless transitions.

"But this has brought about an awareness for teachers that 'I am responsible to teach all these areas of the curriculum,' " Clark County School District curriculum director Lauren Kohut-Rost said. "I mean, if you really love fractions, you could spend a whole year on fractions. But there are other areas."

The standards council assembled teams of 20 or so members -- teachers, parents, business people -- to determine the new standards.

The English, math and science teams crafted a framework of topics that teachers would be required to teach. Then the teams developed performance standards, effectively defining what students would have to do to pass assignments and tests.

The State School Board approved the standards in August.

Teams are now working on new standards for social studies, computer education, the arts and health and physical education.

"I cannot begin to tell you how broad a task this has been," Smith said.

The council now is trying to figure out how to get the standards in the hands of teachers by the beginning of the next school year, now just eight months away.

"Teachers are going to be the most important link as to how the standards are going to become implemented," said Vonne Chowning, a member of the standards council and a state assemblywoman.

A few teachers already have seen copies of the new standards, and some say they don't see much new.

Owen McDermott this week was leading Blake Montoya and his other 15 third-grade students at Gordon McCaw Elementary School through a science experiment on gravity and inertia. McDermott said he probably won't be changing his lesson plans much.

"The new standards are written verbatim from the curriculum that we're already teaching," McDermott, who has studied the new standards on the Internet, said. "The new standards are just a little more detailed than what the curriculum says."

Third-grade teacher Karen Rashmir at Howard Wasden Elementary School said she also covers all the material in the new state standards.

This week, she introduced her kids to multiplication. Some of her pupils cut out and colored 11 four-legged animals and then calculated the total number of legs. According to the new standards, Rashmir's 19 pupils will be required to know multiplication tables for all single-digit numbers by the end of the year.

"It looks like we match up pretty well," Rashmir said, looking over some of the new standards. "It's nice for me to see that I'm right on."

'Big changes coming'

Other teachers say they are going to have to adjust their lesson plans to accommodate more rigorous material.

"There are some big changes coming," Keller Middle School math teacher Susan Lopez said. Lopez worked on the team that wrote new math standards.

Lopez explained that in math, for instance, students will be introduced to more algebra concepts in their eighth-grade math classes, a year before most students take an algebra class. Some students, however, never take algebra.

Lopez agrees with some teachers who say it will be a real race for them to cover all the material written into the new standards. Some teachers have said they spend a lot of time remediating students at the beginning of the school year, which cuts down on the amount of material they cover.

"It'll be tough," Lopez said. "There is a lot of content here."

Some high school teachers cringe at the new standards. They know the new standards eventually will be written into the state's proficiency exam, which high school students must pass to graduate.

"It's amazing the amount of material here," Silverado High School science teacher Brent Richmond said. "They're asking me to teach material in a week that would take me a month to cover, and there would still be students who aren't getting it."

Officials say the exit exam will get even more difficult once the new standards are written into it. That's bad news for some students -- 21 percent of those who took the test last spring flunked the reading section and 33 percent flunked the math section.

Worried about dropout rate

"I just see the dropout rate increasing," Silverado High School Principal Aldeane Ries said.

Some of the standards seemed unrealistic, she said, noting that the more difficult material may intimidate students out the door. Ries also said that students who come to high school for subjects such as music, art, auto shop or other vocational skills will be forced to drop them to focus on math or science courses that they will never need.

"I don't want kids to have the easy way out," Ries said. "But the expectations for any individual students need to be realistic. There's a point of no return where we lose these kids. Not every student is going to be a rocket scientist."

Some officials say other students could be shut out by the new standards.

"I have no expectation that we're going to have a great percentage of special-education students pass the proficiency exam with the new academic standards in place," said Bill Hanlon, a state Board of Education member who is also on the standards writing team in math.

"English-language learners are going to have great difficulty passing this test," he added.

Eventually, education officials will have to figure out how to test students to determine whether they were taught the more rigorous material outlined in the new standards.

One way to do that for high school students will be to examine the results of the proficiency exam. Methods for testing for the new standards in lower grades are still being discussed. Whatever the plan, it will be expensive.

Writing the standards into the proficiency exam will cost about $687,000 each year because the test must be changed annually, according to Keith Reault, deputy state superintendent for public instruction.

So far, lawmakers have not committed any state money for evaluating the new standards by testing students.

At this point, most parents don't know much, if anything, about the new standards.

"They are going to think that this is just some bureaucratic thing," Moises Denis, president of the Clark County area PTA, said.

But Denis said parents should examine the new standards carefully -- the documents contain a wealth of information about what kids should be learning in school.

"This is going to help parents to understand what is expected of their children," Denis said.

Emphasis on 'eventually'

Members of the standards council seem confident that Nevada students eventually will be able to meet the new standards.

"I think it is realistic, but 'eventually' is the key word," standards council leader Smith said.

Ultimately, education officials will try to answer the question, "Did raising the bar work?"

"There's a lot of work left to do, there's no question," Smith said. "I look at this as the beginning, not the end."

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