Title:
Should All US Students Learn the Same Thing?
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
More than forty of the fifty American states have
approved what are known as the common core state
standards. These are lists of content that students
are supposed to learn at each grade level from
kindergarten to high school. State governors and
schools chiefs led the effort to develop the
standards. The project involved teachers,
administrators, experts and public comments. The
final standards were released in June of twenty-ten.
Acceptance is voluntary. But acceptance helped
states that entered President Obama's
four-billion-dollar "Race to the Top" competition
for school reform.The standards are for English
language arts and math. Supporters say these provide
clear goals to prepare students to succeed in
college and in jobs. But critics of national
standards say the idea goes against one of America's
oldest traditions -- local control of education.
Political conservatives generally oppose federal
intervention in schools. Yet it was a Republican
president, George W. Bush, who expanded testing
requirements to show that public schools are making
yearly progress. Still, opponents of national
standards call them "one-size-fits-all." They say
the idea does not make sense for a country as large
and diverse as the United States. One of those
opponents is Bill Evers at the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University in California. He was an
assistant education secretary under President Bush.
Mr. Evers warns about "closing the door on
innovation by locking in a national, uniform
bureaucratic system." He says, "The states don't
have a problem in setting their curriculum --
they've been doing it ever since there've been
public schools."Richard Riley was education
secretary to President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. Mr.
Riley says: "Conservatives would be concerned if we
had federal-mandated common core standards. That's
not what we have. It's a state-driven measure. High
standards, challenging work for young people across
the country." Mr. Riley says in the nineteen
nineties he pushed states to develop their own
statewide standards. But some of those standards
were not very strong, he says, so he believes
national standards are needed. But Bill Evers says
technology now makes it easier to develop individual
learning plans for students. He says schools should
worry less about a common curriculum and more about
improving teacher quality. For VOA Special English,
I'm Alex Villarreal. You can find a link to the
common core standards at voaspecialenglish.com.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
