ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 18, 1996 TAG: 9608190074
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL TURNER STAFF WRITER
First-grade teacher Nancy Adams has been researching Jane Addams, John Paul Jones and George Washington Carver this summer.
She's been looking for details of their lives that might grab the attention of her young pupils.
She discovered that Addams, an American social worker and humanitarian who shared the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, helped develop parks for inner-city residents. She thinks that will be a way to introduce Addams to her 6-year-old pupils when playground safety is discussed.
Adams, a teacher at Glenvar Elementary School in Roanoke County, will have to teach her class about Addams, Jones and Carver as part of the state's new academic standards.
She'll also have to teach economics, civics and geography to first-graders as part of the new social studies curriculum, in addition to revised curricula in English, science and math.
Adams will introduce them to the difference between goods and services and explain how people are both consumers and producers of goods and services.
The students will be required to identify the elected governing bodies that make local, state and national laws. And they'll have to locate the Roanoke Valley, Virginia, United States, the continents and the oceans on a map and a globe.
For Adams and many of Virginia's other public school teachers, there have been fewer trips to the beach and more work than usual this summer.
They've been gearing up to teach the state's new academic standards, called standards of learning, that will be implemented this fall.
The standards are the benchmarks of knowledge and skills that the children are expected to master from kindergarten to graduation in four core subjects: English, math, science and social studies.
The standards are set forth in 100 pages of details and are designed to improve educational achievement. They will be mandatory for all schools.
Adams has worked this summer with a team of about 30 county elementary and secondary social studies teachers, assembling materials and resources to help assure that teachers cover the social studies standards.
Textbooks that include all of the content and skills instruction that will be required by the new standards are not yet available for elementary grades and secondary school courses.
David Wymer, social studies supervisor for Roanoke County, said the team of teachers has revised the curriculum to ensure that the materials are covered.
The teachers have attended workshops to become familiar with the new standards and get ideas on how to teach them. School administrators have brought in consultants and experts for briefings.
The educators have also prepared curriculum guides and notebooks for elementary teachers that cover the social studies standards, particularly in the early grades, Wymer said.
Teachers in Roanoke, Salem and virtually every school division in the state have been busy doing the same thing this summer.
Rita Bishop, Roanoke's assistant superintendent for instruction, said the city system has several committees working on the curriculum revisions and has budgeted $75,000 for teacher workshops on the standards.
At Roanoke's recent leadership conference for principals and top school administrators for the upcoming school year, several sessions focused on ways to ensure that teachers cover the content and skills required.
Several statewide conferences have been held this summer for school principals and teachers, and Bishop said more training and workshops will be held this fall.
Superintendent Wayne Harris said Roanoke schools will make a major effort in the upcoming school year to use computers and technology to develop effective instruction.
The standards, which were adopted by the state Board of Education last year, are the centerpiece of Gov. George Allen's effort to improve public education in Virginia and part of a nationwide movement to raise academic achievement.
Virginia has had academic standards since 1981, but they were generalized guidelines and advisories for school systems. Schools and teachers were not held accountable for them.
The new standards have won praise from educators inside and outside the state. In a recent report assessing the quality of academic standards in all 50 states, the American Federation of Teachers, the nation's second largest teachers' union, classified Virginia's as "exemplary" and models for other states.
The state Board of Education said the state's responsibility is to set expectations for what students should know at key points in their educational careers and to measure results at designated grade levels.
Board members said the local school boards and schools have the responsibility to determine how to teach children to achieve the standards.
Students will be tested in grades three, five, eight and 11 to determine whether they have met the expectations. The testing will be cumulative, covering the material between the tested grades, and will provide comparative information on how well Virginia students are doing when measured against their peers nationally.
The field testing will begin in the spring of 1997, but the first year's scores will be used only for establishing scoring guidelines and will not be released. The full testing program is expected to be in place and providing results by June 1998.
The state is using consultants to help prepare the tests. The General Assembly appropriated $12 million for development and implementation of the testing program.
The social studies and history standards have received the most attention because of the controversy over the drafting of them, particularly the debate about whether some of the expectations are too difficult for young children.
Wymer said the county's social studies teachers have given special attention to the new requirement for teaching more economics in the early elementary grades.
"The economics requirements have raised some eyebrows," he said. "We've been teaching economics, but not with the emphasis, especially at the lower grades, that the new standards require.''
Elementary teachers will have to become familiar with the terminology and vocabulary of economics, he said.
Roanoke County will buy new social studies textbooks for all grades in the next year.
"We are lucky that our purchase of textbooks will coincide with the adoption of the new standards," Wymer said.
There are also new standards in other subjects.
Roanoke County science teachers have been assembling materials for some grades and courses because current science textbooks, like those in social studies, don't cover all of the content in the new standards, said Billie Reid, science supervisor.
Roanoke will begin a major initiative in the upcoming year to improve math education, including incorporation of the new math standards, Bishop said. Math teachers have been working on that project this summer.
The new math standards also include technology and computer skills that students should acquire by the end of the fifth and eighth grades. Eighth-graders will have to know how to create home pages for the Internet, use spreadsheets and create graphs to visually represent data.
Some teachers think the new expectations will require too much material to be covered too quickly. They worry that there will not be enough time for students to fully absorb the content before they have to move on to the next requirement.
"There is a lot of material in the early grades that we haven't covered in the past," said Jo Reedy, a second-grade teacher at Herman L. Horn Elementary School in Roanoke County. "We're going to have to simplify some of it for younger children.''
Some educators think the standards might be too difficult for economically disadvantaged children.
Dan Fleming, a retired professor in the College of Education at Virginia Tech, said some of the social studies standards are so difficult that they might discourage rather than motivate students.
"It is likely that the failure rate will soar, depending on the assessment policy for what constitutes passing," Fleming said.
But Wymer believes students will adjust to the new academic requirements better than some critics think.
"Children can often do more than we give them credit for," he said. "They understand more than we think."
Young children will be exposed to tougher academic standards in the early elementary grades, he said, but that could be beneficial as long as the testing is fair.
While the curriculum will be revised to cover the content in the new standards, school officials said teachers won't limit their instruction to the standards or focus on them.
"We're not going to be teaching to the tests," Wymer said. "We're reviewing our curriculum to make sure we cover the material in the standards, but our curriculum will remain much broader. We'll keep what we've had."
Some teachers are skeptical of politicians' call for new and rigorous academic standards, said Rob Jones of Virginia Beach, former president of the Virginia Education Association.
"The politicians speak of high standards, but school administrations continue to pressure teachers to pass students who do not study," Jones said in a recent letter responding to a Roanoke Times editorial that was critical of the VEA position on the standards. "The dual cry for high standards and high grades regardless of performance is certainly cause for cynicism and distrust."
While the state does need to invest $12 million in tests for the new standards, Jones said, it is doubtful the results will reveal anything unexpected. The tests are likely to show huge gaps in student performance between affluent, urban localities and poor, rural counties, he said.
The VEA has complained that the state has not provided enough money for implementing the new standards, including training for teachers.
The General Assembly appropriated $1.5 million for teacher training and curriculum development, but the VEA says that falls far short of the amount that is needed for training and instructional equipment.
After the testing has been fully implemented, school systems will issue "report cards" on individual schools on the test scores and other student performance information.
The state Board of Education is considering "consequences" for schools that fail to meet the standards, but no decision has been made on them.
The Champion School Commission, which was appointed by Allen, has suggested the possibility of closing schools and dismissing the superintendent and teaching staff when schools perform poorly, but those ideas have come under sharp attack by the VEA.
As part of the push for higher academic standards, the Board of Education is also considering overhauling the state school accreditation standards that all schools must meet.
"With new academic standards in place and a new assessment program under way, [the board] is now ready to take the next step: a fresh, new look at the standards of accreditation for our public schools," said Michelle Easton, board president. "We want to recast our accrediting standards to focus on what is really important to all of us."
Some board members want to put more emphasis on student academic achievement and less on state regulations on school buildings, libraries and other facilities. The board has held public hearings to receive suggestions on new accreditation standards.
LENGTH: Long : 197 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Wymer. Graphic: Chart by staff: New academicby CNBstandards of accountability.