Califronia Standards

In the start of the reading we are giving some background as to why the students have to take standardize testing. It was created from the Leroy Greene California Assessment of Academic Achievement Act and the tests are suppose to show “the level of competence at each grade level.” These standardize tests are seen as a “framework” that teachers, school administrators, and parents could follow together. Since all of them want to support the student’s progress the standards are a way for all of them to come to a consensus. The framework of the standards also brings the curriculum to students who have special-need, disabilities, English language learners, and students who are at risk at failing.

For the standards to work there needs to be a discipline in four different categories: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. To the standards, language skills are used for the human spirit to be “enriched and preserve the collective memory of a nation.” They don’t believe that language skills are just for learning and career development so it has to come together in the classroom. To broaden the students range in reading, the standards suggest that students should read a wide range of quality texts. Doing this will develop their proficiency and will help with writing. Having reading and writing working together seems to be a central idea of the standards and they see it as being very important. In the reading they state that “in an emergency, reading and writing with speed and accuracy may literally mean the difference between life and death.”

The standards make it clear that reading and writing is their “principal goal” when they say that literature helps students experience history and encounter different cultures. When the students have a good form of literacy, the standards wants the students to be able to express their ideas clearly. This all comes back to the idea that the four main categories “exist in relation to each other.” But to make sure that the students don’t get affected in trying to achieve all the goals of the standards there aren’t any alterations for anyone. They don’t want to “deny these students the opportunity to reach them.” So if a school has a certain number of English language learners then the schools “must seize the chance to align special programs to make everyone work toward the same goal.”