Report Cards for the States - Curriculum Standards

The folks over at AcademicBenchmarks.org have posted a report card on U.S. curriculum standards publishing efforts. It’s important reading for anyone interested in improving K-12 education in this country.

Their Standards Digital Deployment Report is an assessment of how well each state does in the digital deployment of curriculum standards. The report rates each state in 3 areas:

• Accessibility — The degree to which a state supports or provides access to its standards to various stakeholders (teachers, parents, technology vendors, publishers, etc.) in various formats (PDF, Excel, XML, etc).
• Usability — The amount of guidance a state provides for interpreting and referencing its standards for numerous uses (curriculum, assessment, etc.) by various stakeholders.
• Revision Practices — How well a state communicates initial, iterative, or complete overhaul of its standards.

Data for about half the states comes from a questionnaire, with ratings for those states that have not yet responded based on what’s available on the department of education website for that state.

With all of the attention the web has been getting in the education world, you’d think having curriculum standards published in machine-readable form would be the rule. Sadly the situation is quite the reverse. Only 3 states, New York, Ohio, and Maryland, publish curriculum standards in XML. What’s shocking is that 26% of the states that did return their questionnaires did not understand the meaning of “machine-readable”.

The indexing for curriculum standards is a mess as well. Only 29% of states assign a unique number to each standard within that state, so even referencing a particular standard is difficult. The other states either don’t assign standard index numbers at all, or reuse numbers across different subjects or different standards documents. There is, alas, no curriculum standard numbering system in use by more than one state.

In addition to the Standards Digital Deployment Report, the site at AcademicBenchmarks.org provides searchable versions of state curriculum standards as well as links to the curriculum standards web resources for all 50 US States, the District of Columbia, and a dozen Canadian curriculum standards authorities. It’s a great resource, and Academic Benchmarks deserves a lot of credit for making so much of the work they’ve done on the .com side of the house available on the .org site.