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Recommended
Reading
The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them
by E.D. Hirsch  Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms by Diane Ravitch  Ed School Follies by Rita Kramer  Dumbing Down Our Kids by Charles Sykes  The Language Police by Diane Ravitch  Why Johnny Can't Read and Why Johnny Still Can't Read by Rudolf Flesch  Angry Parents, Failing Schools by Elaine McEwan 
by Richard Phelps
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Standards
Iowa is the only state in the nation that does not have statewide academic standards. This results in each local district creating their own, an enormously time consuming and inefficient task. In addition, it is very difficult for parents to know what their children are being taught, or to make comparisons between districts. With 371 school districts in Iowa, each having their own set of standards, evaluation by an independent organization becomes impossible. Education in Iowa's public schools will begin to improve only when rigorous, meaningful, explicit standards are adopted statewide.
The State of State
Standards By the Fordham Foundation, a state-by-state
review of standards, with links to examples of some of the best standards. Click
on Testing and Accountability. There are several articles on State
standards.
Cedar Rapids School District Standards
Scroll down to Student Advocacy, then click on Standards and
Benchmarks, under Teaching and Learning.
It is informative to compare CRCSD standards to those of states who have developed explicit, measurable standards that allow the public to know exactly what is expected of the student. For example, compare the CRCSD elementary level "Communications" standards (follow above link) to California's excellent English standards. While the local standards are general, fuzzy, non-measurable platitudes such as "Listen effectively", "Improve spelling" and "Identify parts of speech..", California is very specific:
Decoding and Word Recognition 1.10 Generate the sounds from all the letters and letter patterns, including consonant blends and long- and short-vowel patterns (i.e., phonograms), and blend those sounds into recognizable words. 1.11 Read common, irregular sight words (e.g., the, have, said, come, give, of). 1.12 Use knowledge of vowel digraphs and r-controlled letter-sound associations to read words. 1.13 Read compound words and contractions. 1.14 Read inflectional forms (e.g., -s, -ed, -ing) and root words (e.g., look, looked, looking). 1.15 Read common word families (e.g., -ite, -ate). 1.16 Read aloud with fluency in a manner that sounds like natural speech.Punctuation 1.4 Distinguish between declarative, exclamatory, and interrogative sentences. 1.5 Use a period, exclamation point, or question mark at the end of sentences. 1.6 Use knowledge of the basic rules of punctuation and capitalization when writing.
It is not hard to imagine which system will produce the better "communicator".
