Barbara McClanahan

Associate Professor
Educational Instruction and Leadership
Southeastern Oklahoma State University
I have finished a cursory review of the PK-4 draft standards, and I don't present my thoughts as based on an
in-depth review. I find things I like and things I don't like.
In general, I think the standards for these grades represent an appropriate progression of cognitive skills based
on typical child development. I also conferred with a colleague of mine at Southeastern who is more of an early
childhood expert than I, and she agrees.
My biggest concern at the PK level, and even K, is a lack of a standard for play. Much recent research
suggests strongly that not only is play a critical need for these young students, but pushing the cognitive skills
required for early reading may later be found to be detrimental. I think more important than learning letter
names or sounds, there should be a standard calling for a substantial portion of the school day to be devoted to
both structured and unstructured play. Despite what many people believe, play is a learning strategy and
should absolutely have a standard at this level. In addition, all of the standards regarding reading skills, even
comprehension of texts read aloud, should be applied very flexibly to allow for a wide range of developmental
levels in any given PK-2 classroom.
As we move into K, the content regarding phonics and phonemic awareness builds, but these standards, along
with vocabulary, again may not be reachable for a large percentage of students simply because of
developmental issues. Again, the standards must be applied flexibly.
Standard 8 for K says: "Students will demonstrate interest in books..." That seems to me to be an impossible
standard because interest must be built on students' affect over which the teacher has minimal control. You
cannot command students to be interested in books. Recognizing this, I think it is important for the standard to
read "Students will demonstrate growing interest in books..." That is something a teacher could monitor through
observation and, with reflection, adjust the teaching approach to move the child along on a continuum of
interest.
In both PK and K, the word "With guidance and support" appear frequently, but beginning in first grade, they
disappear almost completely. Especially for Standard 5, Language, I believe they need to be used to support
sentence writing. And again I think the language should read something like "The student will show growth in
the ability to compose..." As long as we are determined to maintain and age/grad system, many students will
continue to need "guidance and support" into second grade.
Fluency seems inadequately addressed across the board in the standards. In Grade 2, for example, I think
there should be something here to the effect that regularly spelled and previously decoded words will be
increasingly recognized automatically in order to build fluency. This is the essence of mature reading but is not
mentioned anywhere.
In the Grade 2 Writing standard there is a phrase that makes no sense to me: "include past tense or irregularly
past tense verbs".
In 3rd Grade, several standards require a level of abstraction that may not be obtainable by a significant
percentage of third graders. For example, while according to the standards, third graders need guidance and
support to determine the theme of a story, they are expected to negotiate figurative language on their own.
Hmmm....
Beginning in the first grade standards, the reading comprehension strategies are essentially the same across
the grade levels up through 4th. One must assume that the differences lie in the level of depth to which the
student is required to implement them and the level of text, but that is not spelled out. In the standards on
Critical Reading and Writing, we see a similar progression of requirements up through the grade levels; I would
expect that by 4th grade one of the requirements would be to identify how characters change over the course
of the plot, but I did not see it. It could reasonably appear as early as 2nd or 3rd.

One other concern that my colleague had was that there should be a glossary; she fears that not all teachers
would understand all the terms being used. Another concern I have is that some of the terms have ambiguous
meanings. For example, what does grade-specific or grade-appropriate actually mean?
I actually think this is a pretty good beginning. If I had more time, I would like to compare these with other good
standards, such as the "old" Massachusetts ones. Alas, I do not have that kind of time.
I hope this is helpful.