McREL exports standards around the world
“Exotic” is not a word that most of us associate with writing education standards, but it aptly describes some of the places around the world that are benefiting from the expertise of McREL’s standards team.
While most of work of the standards team involves writing and evaluating standards for districts and states in the continental United States, they work with international clients every year or two—and look forward to the unique challenges and rewards each contract brings. In the past three years, international clients included the American Samoa Department of Education, the American School Foundation (ASF) in Mexico City, Mexico, and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) schools.
“(International) clients often come from a completely different
educational tradition, so understanding what to emphasize and what to
change requires our understanding how they currently develop and implement
curriculum,” said John Kendall, senior director of research.
The American Samoa school district came to McREL with the goal of revising
its existing standards. As an unincorporated territory of the United
States, American Samoa is not required to fulfill No Child Left Behind
requirements, but the district wanted its standards to be on par with
those of the top-rated states. Kendall and the standards group wrote
K–12 mathematics and language arts standards in 2004 and in 2006,
wrote science and social studies standards. Later that year, they wrote
assessment items for the standards they had previously created. In both
phases of the project, the team had to be culturally sensitive.
“There are a lot of rural schools in American Samoa that don’t have the technological advances that most Americans schools have,” explained Amitra Schwols, senior content analyst. For this reason, McREL minimized, for example, computer references which required computer “fluency” in the assessment items. On the other hand, they went into greater detail than usual on some standards, such as ones dealing with water and air pollution and astronomy.
Other, more unexpected cultural differences were revealed in the process, said Schwols. One of the assessment items they wrote included a girl slamming a door and storming up the stairs, with students being asked how she felt. Students scored poorly on this item because, as the team found out, houses in American Samoa don’t have stairs. So, students were caught up on the idea of stairs in a house rather than focusing on what the question asked.
Unusual items also recently came into play with the ASF, an international, K–12 bilingual (English and Spanish) school in Mexico City. ASF approached McREL with a request to create standards that would help stabilize its curriculum. The school attracts international teachers, many of whom stay for a year or less, and such turnover causes discontinuity. ASF asked McREL to write standards based on curriculum maps they gathered from teachers.
This was unique for the team, Schwols said, because they usually don’t synthesize standards in that way, but they found the curriculum maps to be quite complete—and interesting. For example, kindergarten maps include going to an active volcano, and sixth graders compare the viscosity of lava; for its history standards, 11th -and 12th-grade students dig trenches in the football field to simulate World War I battlefields.
To write the ASF standards, the McREL team examined the curriculum maps and consulted state ratings from two national reviews, one from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a second from Education Week magazine. Then, using their judgment on the quality of those standards and taking into account the needs of the client, they selected a final set of 3–5 “top states” from which to draw. ASF is currently reviewing the standards McREL wrote in the first half of this year.
In addition to American Samoa and Mexico, McREL has helped revise standards that will be used in a dozen other countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and on Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, as part of our work for the DoDEA schools. In 2006, DoDEA, which has over 200 schools serving 88,000 students, tapped McREL to evaluate for rigor their existing standards in mathematics, English/language arts, and social studies, and to make sure that children attending a DoDEA school, no matter where it is in the world, get the same education. McREL’s analysis used standards from states that had a large military student population, such as California, Florida, and Hawaii, and the top-rated states of Indiana, Massachusetts, California, and Georgia. The team has completed recommendations in mathematics and social studies and is currently working on English/language arts.
You may be wondering, how do these clients find their way to McREL? Kendall owes much of the work to McREL’s longstanding reputation for standards work and, of course, the Internet. “Often, contracts start from an e-mail dropped from cyberspace,” he said. “I suspect that, in many cases, they use a search engine to learn about standards in the United States and commonly find themselves at the Compendium and McREL.” And more often than not, no matter where they started, they’ve come to the right place.