Chapter 6; Accountability for High Standards

This chapter is about accountability. The accountability teachers should teach their students and hold them responsible for. Then there is academic accountability which is in the form of standards. As much as educators complain about standards they are necessary as a basic framework for curriculum. The standards that students are expected to ace are moving away from rote memorization of facts in multiple choice format to short response questions asking questions higher on Bloom's Taxonomy. Standards are the basic skeleton. It is the teacher that adds the rest of the flesh and details to the body.

I thought it was really interesting that the book said, "standards are not limits, they are minimums." I had never thought of it like that. Students are allowed but never encouraged to exceed the standard. So much focus is put on just meeting the standard.