Stats About Educational Standards and Teaching

“We have simply identified too much content to teach in grades K-12.” 

I’m gonna tell you why you are stressed. You have TOO MANY standards to teach!

Did you know teachers:

– Have approximately 200 standards to cover each year.
– Have about 5.6 hours of class time per day to teach said standards.
– Which equates to about 1,008 hours per school year.

But… only about 696 actual hours are available per year of instruction when disruptions to the typical school day are considered.

So you’re 312 hours short already!

We actually need 15,495 hours to cover the standards, which means that the total amount of instruction time would need to increase by 71%. The bottom line is, the only way this can be done is if students attend school until grade 21.  (Yes, you hard that right.)

Even if time could be magically added to the school year, it would not be advisable to teach all of the content found in the national and state standards. U.S. math textbooks attempt to cover 175 more topics than German textbooks and 350% more than Japanese textbooks. U.S. science textbooks cover more than nine times as many topics as German ones and four times more than Japanese ones. 

Yet, German and Japanese students significantly outperform U.S. students in math and science. 

How Standards-Based Grading Helps

Kim giving an educator a high five

When I work with schools on standards-based grading, one of the first things we do is prioritize the standards. We decide which ones are the priority standards (10-15 standards) that will then receive 50-75% of instruction time. The next tier of standards receives around 25-50% of instruction time, and the last tier gets 5-10% of instruction time.

We teach you how to go deep within the standards rather than trail-blazing through them at breakneck speeds in hopes that kids retain them, yet we know they never do. You simply cannot expect students to learn all the key skills and processes taught so quickly and haphazardly. 

Plus, teachers feel relief when they learn a systematic approach for prioritizing their standards and grading student work. 

I know this is a hot topic, but it’s also one of the biggest reasons I get sent in to work with schools or provide virtual trainings on this topic. If you are an administrator or a teacher and want to learn more about this topic, you can explore the standards-based grading course here

I believe so much in SBG that I actually offer the online course for free for administrators for 30 days. Simply respond to this email if you’d like access.

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