Introduction
While many blame schools and teachers for the failure to produce a
learned, well-equipped individual after the completion of high school, one additional
factor in a public school student’s education is being overlooked – state
education standards. Georgia recently revised its standards, the Quality Core Curriculum
(QCC). The new QCC has many successes and is a milestone in terms of progressing from the
old standards, but there is always room for improvement in any sector of public school
education. Although this revised QCC succeeds in improving Georgia’s public grade
schools, it has fallen short of some of its goals.
When teachers were surveyed by the Atlanta Journal Constitution before
the revision, most agreed that the standards needed three specific improvements. They
wanted: 1) higher standards that were clear and measurable, 2) standards that helped them
plan their lessons, and 3) standards that paid attention to technology as a skill to be
taught and as a part of classroom instruction
This report will examine the new Georgia QCC’s standards in each
of five major subject areas: language arts, geography, history, mathematics and science,
and will offer a comparison between the QCC and the standards contained in some nationally
acclaimed curricula. Included in this comparison are:
1) the Core Knowledge Foundation’s set of standards for grades
K-8, now used by more than 150 schools in 30 states, including Georgia. The Core Knowledge
Sequence is a guide to 50 percent of a school’s curriculum and gives teachers the
freedom to decide what to teach beyond what is listed in the standards,2) the curriculum of Hillsdale Academy, a K-8 charter school in
Michigan which is beginning to expand to other states, and3) the curriculum of the five states selected by the Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation as those offering the best standards in each of the five major subject areas.
After conducting an analysis of the effectiveness of each curriculum in
providing guidance to teachers as well as conveying exactly what students are expected to
know in each subject area, it is clear that Georgia’s QCC should adopt the styles of
some of these other curricula.
Language Arts
Although Georgia’s language arts curriculum is rated among the
best in the nation by the Fordham Foundation, there is some room for improvement. The QCC
is highly rated in its coverage of research skills, its understandable language, and its
avoidance of dogmatism and bias, but it fails to achieve what Georgia teachers wanted.
One of the goals of the new standards was to make them more specific in
order to facilitate the teaching of the subject, but the language arts section seems to be
specific in all the wrong ways. While Georgia’s QCC contains statements such as
“student blends sounds orally to make words” or “student uses increasingly
complex sentence structures,” the Core Knowledge standards specify particular skills
that tell teachers exactly what to teach, such as “makes words plural” or
“recognizes contractions,” neither of which are mentioned in the Georgia
standards.
The language arts portion of the QCC provides little or no guidance to
teachers; rather, it lists vague statements such as “student increases vocabulary to
reflect a growing range of interests and knowledge.” This statement does not give
teachers any help in ascertaining what level of vocabulary students in a particular grade
should have. Massachusetts’ language arts standards, rated best in this subject area
by the Fordham Foundation, provide a detailed statement for grades 9 and 10 –
“Identify and use correctly in all content areas idioms, cognates, words with literal
and figurative meanings, and patterns of word changes that indicate different meanings or
functions. Use a dictionary or related reference.” It also includes an example –
“Students study patterns of changes in a variety of literate words, e.g., for most
verbs ending in -ate, -ize, and -ify, for nouns ending in -ist, and for adjectives ending
in -ic.”
Furthermore, Massachusetts’ language arts curriculum framework
provides writing samples that exemplify what language arts teachers should expect from
their students as well as helpful sections like “Approaches to Literary
Criticism,” “Organizing a Literature Curriculum,” and “Useful Teaching
Practices” for teachers to use when planning lessons. It also contains appendices
that list suggested authors and works for students to read and study. None of these are
provided in the QCC. In fact, there is not one mention of any literary work in the entire
language arts section. In sharp contrast, the Massachusetts’ curriculum framework,
the Core Knowledge Foundation and Hillsdale Academy all provide suggested speeches, poems,
novels and short stories of which students should be aware. Although Georgia’s
education reformers made a conscious decision not to include specific literary works in
the QCC, it is important that must-read works be incorporated into the standards.
The Core Knowledge Foundation has its second graders reading and
learning mythology while they simultaneously study ancient Greece in their history
curriculum. This practice not only increases the child’s interest in the subject at
an earlier age, but it also allows the student to grasp the information better and more
quickly. With respect to content, the QCC does not intertwine subjects such as language
arts and history in the earlier grades to provide a child with a unified and thorough
educational experience. In that same sense, the Fordham Foundation observes that
Georgia’s QCC does not expect its students to do any independent reading, displaying
the lack of any encouragement for children to increase their interest in the subject area
and to go beyond the classroom.
Geography
Though geography is included in the social studies portion of
Georgia’s curriculum, as a nation Americans consider it to be one of the five major
academic subjects by itself. Contrary to what most believe geography to be, the Fordham
Foundation says that geography standards must not only emphasize knowledge of where things
are located, but also why they are located in a particular place and what effects result
because of their place in the world. Students should apply geography knowledge to history
and the future. Georgia’s QCC, like many others, overlooks these important skills.
Georgia’s QCC gives a very cursory treatment to geography
throughout grade school. The elective course in high school teaches elementary level
concepts while the elementary standards do not cover most of the fundamentals of
geography. There is no mention of a study of the 50 states or ecosystems, while
Colorado’s geography standards, ranked number one in the nation by the Fordham
Foundation, address these basics long before high school. Core Knowledge students learn
about continents, landforms, hemispheres and oceans in kindergarten, while Georgia
children are not even introduced to those terms until the second or third grade.
Colorado’s geography standards are arranged in a very organized manner. Grades are
grouped in clusters (K-4, 5-8, 9-12) and include the same concepts but with different
levels of difficulty; first gathering knowledge about the concept, building upon it and
then finishing if off with an in-depth study.
Georgia’s standards do not provide a child with an in-depth study
of the subject and instead focus on the location of places. Students in Colorado apply
their knowledge by analyzing the effect the geography of a country has on its economy in
grades K-4, providing students with a solid foundation of how different geographical
factors play together in the global economy. There is no mention of any such skill in the
earlier grades of the Georgia standards. And, once again, as in the language arts
curriculum, the Core Knowledge standards coordinate history and geography curricula. For
example, while first graders learn about exploration and settlement of the Americas in
history, they also gain knowledge of the geography of those areas explored and settled.
Furthermore, Georgia’s QCC provides no tools with which teachers
can plan their lessons. The document lists approximately five statements on geography per
grade. Colorado, on the other hand, provides videotape about the standards, including the
definitions of geography terms used in the document, precisely the type of planning aid
Georgia teachers could use.
History
The history section of the QCC, like the geography section, is listed
within the social studies portion of the document. According to the Fordham Foundation,
Georgia’s standards are “long and cumbersome” and their “historical
content and skills are scattered and incoherent,” which appears blatantly true after
a quick glance at the document.
Chronology is one of the most important concepts in history, yet
Georgia’s QCC does not value it as much as it should. In the second grade,
Georgia’s entire history curriculum consists of students “comparing the present
day customs and lifestyles of the United States to selected places in the Eastern
Hemisphere including Japan and Australia,” “comparing the lifestyles of Eastern
Woodlands and Plains Indians,” and “describing the customs and lifestyles of the
Early American settlers in Plymouth and Jamestown colonies.” Together, these three
statements hardly emphasize the concept of chronology. As in the other grade levels, the
second grade standards jump from topic to topic without giving any of them an in-depth
treatment. In contrast, the Core Knowledge history curriculum is split into World
Civilization and American Civilization. After studying up to the American Revolution in
the first grade, Core Knowledge second graders learn about the Constitution, the War of
1812, westward expansion and the Civil War in just one section of the history standards.
This method clearly teaches young students basic American history in chronological order,
to be studied in greater detail in later grades.
Virginia’s history and social science standards, ranked best in
the nation by the Fordham Foundation, emphasizes chronology in a different but equally
effective way. Students study the contributions of ancient Egypt and China in the second
grade, the discovery of America and other western exploration in the third grade, Virginia
from 1607 to the present in the fourth grade and then study American history to 1877 in
the fifth grade, giving each topic the attention and order that it deserves.
Though the QCC is successful in enumerating with great detail
historical events and people, it fails to incorporate analytical skills. While the QCC
indicates that Georgia students are discussing, describing and identifying, there are few
statements that list such skills as debating, analyzing, writing or supplemental reading.
Georgia’s QCC may even be behind with respect to historical content – while
Virginia, Core Knowledge and Hillsdale Academy students learn about George Washington in
kindergarten or the first grade, Georgia’s QCC does not even mention the “Father
of Our Country” until the fourth grade.
In addition, Virginia’s standards include periodic Computer and
Technology Standards (at the end of the fifth and eighth grades). These standards address
key technology concepts and skills that correspond to school curriculum and are practical
for students, precisely what Georgia teachers wanted but did not receive in the revised
QCC.
Mathematics
The revisions to the QCC’s mathematics standards are quite
impressive. A comparison with California’s standards (rated highest in the nation by
the Fordham Foundation), the Core Knowledge Sequence and Hillsdale Academy shows that the
QCC was successful in matching the specificity of these other mathematics curricula. The
QCC lists such minute but important skills from “counting backwards from 20” in
the first grade to “determining geometric relationships such as parallel to,
perpendicular to, inside, outside, on, symmetrical, same size as, same shape as, same size
and shape but different position/orientation” in the fourth grade. The exactness and
clarity of the standards allows teachers to easily plan their lessons, achieving one of
the goals of the revision.
However, there are a few areas in which the mathematics portion of the
QCC could be improved. In an attempt to satisfy the demands of teachers, it seems that the
revisers of the QCC included a little too much technology in the curriculum. The deductive
nature of mathematics appears to have been lost or under-emphasized. For example, the
Fordham Foundation was quick to notice that the introduction to the mathematics portion
sets the stage for this type of thought. It states, “Scientific calculators and
computers are essential tools for learning and doing mathematics at all grade
levels,” giving more importance to technology than it deserves, especially in earlier
grades. Also, the geometry section of the curriculum mentions every geometrical term and
concept in detail, but fails to ask the student for a traditional proof, the most
deductive concept of all in the subject.
Though Georgia is on par with other curricula in the earlier grades, it
starts lagging behind by the end of seventh grade. While all eighth graders in California
are taught Algebra I, only honors students in Georgia are given the opportunity to learn
Algebra I in the eighth grade, leaving other students unprepared for higher levels of math
in high school.
Science
The science portion of the QCC is exemplary in its use of detail, but
almost to the point that it becomes confusing and distracting to read. The document lists
the content standard, topic, concept and other notes in four separate columns. The content
standard and concept, however, are so closely related that one seems redundant and the
standard seems to be split awkwardly. For example, a second grade content standard states,
“Distinguishes among states of matter (solid, liquid, and gas). Sorts objects
according to solid, liquid, or gas,” while in the same row, the concept column says,
“All matter takes up space and has mass. Most can exist in three states – solid,
liquid, and gas.” These two columns can be combined to make the document more concise
and easier for teachers to understand.
Georgia could take a few lessons from Indiana’s Science
Proficiency Guide, ranked highest by the Fordham Foundation. The style of writing used in
the Indiana standards presents a major difference from the QCC. Indiana’s standards
are in a paragraph format, detailing and explaining theoretical applications of a
particular concept, almost like a summary of a textbook. For example, Indiana students
should know that “Water can be a liquid or a solid and can go back and forth from one
form to the other. If water is turned into ice and then the ice is allowed to melt, the
amount of water is the same as it was before freezing.” This statement provides the
concept and an example to go with it at once and is far from the terseness and list-like
style of Georgia’s QCC.
Since science is learned best hands-on, Indiana’s standards
provide “sample action shots” on each page – suggested experiments or
hands-on class activities that supplement and reinforce the material covered. To provide
additional guidance to teachers, a glossary of science terms is listed in the back of the
Indiana science standards. Neither of these is included in Georgia’s QCC.
Indiana is also successful in providing a unified curriculum for its
students by incorporating math skills into the science standards. With much of science
involving measurement, Indiana was wise to include statements about computation and
estimation, essential skills for math as well as science. This practice assures a teacher
that students will have the essential background to apply and use their math skills to
science before assuming so and also helps a teacher plan lessons. Georgia, on the other
hand, fails to include any math skills in the science curriculum, avoiding the type of
redundancy that is often beneficial in teaching.
Conclusion
In addition to the suggestions made above, Georgia’s 1,400 pages
of standards are more than three times the size of other more thoroughly written
curricula. Much of the document has redundant and unnecessary information that could be
eliminated to reduce the cost of the $100 document. While there is no doubt that the QCC
was successful in fulfilling some of the needs of teachers, parents and students, and that
it has come a long way from the old Georgia Quality Core Curriculum, there are many ways
in which the QCC could and should be improved.
Georgia’s QCC seems to underestimate what its students in earlier
grades are capable of learning. It is obvious that since other students are exposed to
more rigorous curricula than the QCC, it is not unreasonable to suggest that Georgia
students match them. Nevertheless, Georgia will never reach its public school education
goals unless teachers are clear on what they must teach their students, which depends upon
well-written and easy to understand standards. Georgia should look to other schools and
standards to improve its public education so that its students can compete well with the
rest of the nation.
Editor’s Note:
Given a chance to review this article prior to publication, Deputy
State Superintendent for Policy and Communications Holly A. Robinson, Ed.D. stressed that
the QCC’s purpose is “to provide a description of what students should know and
be able to do, not a guide for how this is to be accomplished.” She added, “it
is a fluid document, with opportunities to make improvements as needed. Toward this end,
during the summer of 1998, revision teams met to revise non-key secondary courses, review
the QCC in conjunction with the textbook adoption cycle, and develop new courses. It is
our hope that the students of Georgia will demonstrate higher levels of achievement in all
subject areas as a result of the continuous improvement process now in place with the
QCC…”
Vani L. Krishnamurthy is a native Georgian and
currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania. She served as a summer intern at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a nonpartisan,
member-supported research and education organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, that
promotes free markets, limited government and individual responsibility. Nothing written
here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Georgia Public Policy
Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before the U.S.
Congress or the Georgia Legislature.
© Georgia Public Policy Foundation (October 22, 1998). Permission is hereby given to
reprint this article, with appropriate credit given.
Introduction
While many blame schools and teachers for the failure to produce a
learned, well-equipped individual after the completion of high school, one additional
factor in a public school student’s education is being overlooked – state
education standards. Georgia recently revised its standards, the Quality Core Curriculum
(QCC). The new QCC has many successes and is a milestone in terms of progressing from the
old standards, but there is always room for improvement in any sector of public school
education. Although this revised QCC succeeds in improving Georgia’s public grade
schools, it has fallen short of some of its goals.
When teachers were surveyed by the Atlanta Journal Constitution before
the revision, most agreed that the standards needed three specific improvements. They
wanted: 1) higher standards that were clear and measurable, 2) standards that helped them
plan their lessons, and 3) standards that paid attention to technology as a skill to be
taught and as a part of classroom instruction
This report will examine the new Georgia QCC’s standards in each
of five major subject areas: language arts, geography, history, mathematics and science,
and will offer a comparison between the QCC and the standards contained in some nationally
acclaimed curricula. Included in this comparison are:
1) the Core Knowledge Foundation’s set of standards for grades
K-8, now used by more than 150 schools in 30 states, including Georgia. The Core Knowledge
Sequence is a guide to 50 percent of a school’s curriculum and gives teachers the
freedom to decide what to teach beyond what is listed in the standards,2) the curriculum of Hillsdale Academy, a K-8 charter school in
Michigan which is beginning to expand to other states, and3) the curriculum of the five states selected by the Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation as those offering the best standards in each of the five major subject areas.
After conducting an analysis of the effectiveness of each curriculum in
providing guidance to teachers as well as conveying exactly what students are expected to
know in each subject area, it is clear that Georgia’s QCC should adopt the styles of
some of these other curricula.
Language Arts
Although Georgia’s language arts curriculum is rated among the
best in the nation by the Fordham Foundation, there is some room for improvement. The QCC
is highly rated in its coverage of research skills, its understandable language, and its
avoidance of dogmatism and bias, but it fails to achieve what Georgia teachers wanted.
One of the goals of the new standards was to make them more specific in
order to facilitate the teaching of the subject, but the language arts section seems to be
specific in all the wrong ways. While Georgia’s QCC contains statements such as
“student blends sounds orally to make words” or “student uses increasingly
complex sentence structures,” the Core Knowledge standards specify particular skills
that tell teachers exactly what to teach, such as “makes words plural” or
“recognizes contractions,” neither of which are mentioned in the Georgia
standards.
The language arts portion of the QCC provides little or no guidance to
teachers; rather, it lists vague statements such as “student increases vocabulary to
reflect a growing range of interests and knowledge.” This statement does not give
teachers any help in ascertaining what level of vocabulary students in a particular grade
should have. Massachusetts’ language arts standards, rated best in this subject area
by the Fordham Foundation, provide a detailed statement for grades 9 and 10 –
“Identify and use correctly in all content areas idioms, cognates, words with literal
and figurative meanings, and patterns of word changes that indicate different meanings or
functions. Use a dictionary or related reference.” It also includes an example –
“Students study patterns of changes in a variety of literate words, e.g., for most
verbs ending in -ate, -ize, and -ify, for nouns ending in -ist, and for adjectives ending
in -ic.”
Furthermore, Massachusetts’ language arts curriculum framework
provides writing samples that exemplify what language arts teachers should expect from
their students as well as helpful sections like “Approaches to Literary
Criticism,” “Organizing a Literature Curriculum,” and “Useful Teaching
Practices” for teachers to use when planning lessons. It also contains appendices
that list suggested authors and works for students to read and study. None of these are
provided in the QCC. In fact, there is not one mention of any literary work in the entire
language arts section. In sharp contrast, the Massachusetts’ curriculum framework,
the Core Knowledge Foundation and Hillsdale Academy all provide suggested speeches, poems,
novels and short stories of which students should be aware. Although Georgia’s
education reformers made a conscious decision not to include specific literary works in
the QCC, it is important that must-read works be incorporated into the standards.
The Core Knowledge Foundation has its second graders reading and
learning mythology while they simultaneously study ancient Greece in their history
curriculum. This practice not only increases the child’s interest in the subject at
an earlier age, but it also allows the student to grasp the information better and more
quickly. With respect to content, the QCC does not intertwine subjects such as language
arts and history in the earlier grades to provide a child with a unified and thorough
educational experience. In that same sense, the Fordham Foundation observes that
Georgia’s QCC does not expect its students to do any independent reading, displaying
the lack of any encouragement for children to increase their interest in the subject area
and to go beyond the classroom.
Geography
Though geography is included in the social studies portion of
Georgia’s curriculum, as a nation Americans consider it to be one of the five major
academic subjects by itself. Contrary to what most believe geography to be, the Fordham
Foundation says that geography standards must not only emphasize knowledge of where things
are located, but also why they are located in a particular place and what effects result
because of their place in the world. Students should apply geography knowledge to history
and the future. Georgia’s QCC, like many others, overlooks these important skills.
Georgia’s QCC gives a very cursory treatment to geography
throughout grade school. The elective course in high school teaches elementary level
concepts while the elementary standards do not cover most of the fundamentals of
geography. There is no mention of a study of the 50 states or ecosystems, while
Colorado’s geography standards, ranked number one in the nation by the Fordham
Foundation, address these basics long before high school. Core Knowledge students learn
about continents, landforms, hemispheres and oceans in kindergarten, while Georgia
children are not even introduced to those terms until the second or third grade.
Colorado’s geography standards are arranged in a very organized manner. Grades are
grouped in clusters (K-4, 5-8, 9-12) and include the same concepts but with different
levels of difficulty; first gathering knowledge about the concept, building upon it and
then finishing if off with an in-depth study.
Georgia’s standards do not provide a child with an in-depth study
of the subject and instead focus on the location of places. Students in Colorado apply
their knowledge by analyzing the effect the geography of a country has on its economy in
grades K-4, providing students with a solid foundation of how different geographical
factors play together in the global economy. There is no mention of any such skill in the
earlier grades of the Georgia standards. And, once again, as in the language arts
curriculum, the Core Knowledge standards coordinate history and geography curricula. For
example, while first graders learn about exploration and settlement of the Americas in
history, they also gain knowledge of the geography of those areas explored and settled.
Furthermore, Georgia’s QCC provides no tools with which teachers
can plan their lessons. The document lists approximately five statements on geography per
grade. Colorado, on the other hand, provides videotape about the standards, including the
definitions of geography terms used in the document, precisely the type of planning aid
Georgia teachers could use.
History
The history section of the QCC, like the geography section, is listed
within the social studies portion of the document. According to the Fordham Foundation,
Georgia’s standards are “long and cumbersome” and their “historical
content and skills are scattered and incoherent,” which appears blatantly true after
a quick glance at the document.
Chronology is one of the most important concepts in history, yet
Georgia’s QCC does not value it as much as it should. In the second grade,
Georgia’s entire history curriculum consists of students “comparing the present
day customs and lifestyles of the United States to selected places in the Eastern
Hemisphere including Japan and Australia,” “comparing the lifestyles of Eastern
Woodlands and Plains Indians,” and “describing the customs and lifestyles of the
Early American settlers in Plymouth and Jamestown colonies.” Together, these three
statements hardly emphasize the concept of chronology. As in the other grade levels, the
second grade standards jump from topic to topic without giving any of them an in-depth
treatment. In contrast, the Core Knowledge history curriculum is split into World
Civilization and American Civilization. After studying up to the American Revolution in
the first grade, Core Knowledge second graders learn about the Constitution, the War of
1812, westward expansion and the Civil War in just one section of the history standards.
This method clearly teaches young students basic American history in chronological order,
to be studied in greater detail in later grades.
Virginia’s history and social science standards, ranked best in
the nation by the Fordham Foundation, emphasizes chronology in a different but equally
effective way. Students study the contributions of ancient Egypt and China in the second
grade, the discovery of America and other western exploration in the third grade, Virginia
from 1607 to the present in the fourth grade and then study American history to 1877 in
the fifth grade, giving each topic the attention and order that it deserves.
Though the QCC is successful in enumerating with great detail
historical events and people, it fails to incorporate analytical skills. While the QCC
indicates that Georgia students are discussing, describing and identifying, there are few
statements that list such skills as debating, analyzing, writing or supplemental reading.
Georgia’s QCC may even be behind with respect to historical content – while
Virginia, Core Knowledge and Hillsdale Academy students learn about George Washington in
kindergarten or the first grade, Georgia’s QCC does not even mention the “Father
of Our Country” until the fourth grade.
In addition, Virginia’s standards include periodic Computer and
Technology Standards (at the end of the fifth and eighth grades). These standards address
key technology concepts and skills that correspond to school curriculum and are practical
for students, precisely what Georgia teachers wanted but did not receive in the revised
QCC.
Mathematics
The revisions to the QCC’s mathematics standards are quite
impressive. A comparison with California’s standards (rated highest in the nation by
the Fordham Foundation), the Core Knowledge Sequence and Hillsdale Academy shows that the
QCC was successful in matching the specificity of these other mathematics curricula. The
QCC lists such minute but important skills from “counting backwards from 20” in
the first grade to “determining geometric relationships such as parallel to,
perpendicular to, inside, outside, on, symmetrical, same size as, same shape as, same size
and shape but different position/orientation” in the fourth grade. The exactness and
clarity of the standards allows teachers to easily plan their lessons, achieving one of
the goals of the revision.
However, there are a few areas in which the mathematics portion of the
QCC could be improved. In an attempt to satisfy the demands of teachers, it seems that the
revisers of the QCC included a little too much technology in the curriculum. The deductive
nature of mathematics appears to have been lost or under-emphasized. For example, the
Fordham Foundation was quick to notice that the introduction to the mathematics portion
sets the stage for this type of thought. It states, “Scientific calculators and
computers are essential tools for learning and doing mathematics at all grade
levels,” giving more importance to technology than it deserves, especially in earlier
grades. Also, the geometry section of the curriculum mentions every geometrical term and
concept in detail, but fails to ask the student for a traditional proof, the most
deductive concept of all in the subject.
Though Georgia is on par with other curricula in the earlier grades, it
starts lagging behind by the end of seventh grade. While all eighth graders in California
are taught Algebra I, only honors students in Georgia are given the opportunity to learn
Algebra I in the eighth grade, leaving other students unprepared for higher levels of math
in high school.
Science
The science portion of the QCC is exemplary in its use of detail, but
almost to the point that it becomes confusing and distracting to read. The document lists
the content standard, topic, concept and other notes in four separate columns. The content
standard and concept, however, are so closely related that one seems redundant and the
standard seems to be split awkwardly. For example, a second grade content standard states,
“Distinguishes among states of matter (solid, liquid, and gas). Sorts objects
according to solid, liquid, or gas,” while in the same row, the concept column says,
“All matter takes up space and has mass. Most can exist in three states – solid,
liquid, and gas.” These two columns can be combined to make the document more concise
and easier for teachers to understand.
Georgia could take a few lessons from Indiana’s Science
Proficiency Guide, ranked highest by the Fordham Foundation. The style of writing used in
the Indiana standards presents a major difference from the QCC. Indiana’s standards
are in a paragraph format, detailing and explaining theoretical applications of a
particular concept, almost like a summary of a textbook. For example, Indiana students
should know that “Water can be a liquid or a solid and can go back and forth from one
form to the other. If water is turned into ice and then the ice is allowed to melt, the
amount of water is the same as it was before freezing.” This statement provides the
concept and an example to go with it at once and is far from the terseness and list-like
style of Georgia’s QCC.
Since science is learned best hands-on, Indiana’s standards
provide “sample action shots” on each page – suggested experiments or
hands-on class activities that supplement and reinforce the material covered. To provide
additional guidance to teachers, a glossary of science terms is listed in the back of the
Indiana science standards. Neither of these is included in Georgia’s QCC.
Indiana is also successful in providing a unified curriculum for its
students by incorporating math skills into the science standards. With much of science
involving measurement, Indiana was wise to include statements about computation and
estimation, essential skills for math as well as science. This practice assures a teacher
that students will have the essential background to apply and use their math skills to
science before assuming so and also helps a teacher plan lessons. Georgia, on the other
hand, fails to include any math skills in the science curriculum, avoiding the type of
redundancy that is often beneficial in teaching.
Conclusion
In addition to the suggestions made above, Georgia’s 1,400 pages
of standards are more than three times the size of other more thoroughly written
curricula. Much of the document has redundant and unnecessary information that could be
eliminated to reduce the cost of the $100 document. While there is no doubt that the QCC
was successful in fulfilling some of the needs of teachers, parents and students, and that
it has come a long way from the old Georgia Quality Core Curriculum, there are many ways
in which the QCC could and should be improved.
Georgia’s QCC seems to underestimate what its students in earlier
grades are capable of learning. It is obvious that since other students are exposed to
more rigorous curricula than the QCC, it is not unreasonable to suggest that Georgia
students match them. Nevertheless, Georgia will never reach its public school education
goals unless teachers are clear on what they must teach their students, which depends upon
well-written and easy to understand standards. Georgia should look to other schools and
standards to improve its public education so that its students can compete well with the
rest of the nation.
Editor’s Note:
Given a chance to review this article prior to publication, Deputy
State Superintendent for Policy and Communications Holly A. Robinson, Ed.D. stressed that
the QCC’s purpose is “to provide a description of what students should know and
be able to do, not a guide for how this is to be accomplished.” She added, “it
is a fluid document, with opportunities to make improvements as needed. Toward this end,
during the summer of 1998, revision teams met to revise non-key secondary courses, review
the QCC in conjunction with the textbook adoption cycle, and develop new courses. It is
our hope that the students of Georgia will demonstrate higher levels of achievement in all
subject areas as a result of the continuous improvement process now in place with the
QCC…”
Vani L. Krishnamurthy is a native Georgian and currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania. She served as a summer intern at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a nonpartisan, member-supported research and education organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, that promotes free markets, limited government and individual responsibility. Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before the U.S. Congress or the Georgia Legislature.
© Georgia Public Policy Foundation (October 22, 1998). Permission is hereby given to
reprint this article, with appropriate credit given.