Welcome to the Profession

In Virginia, it is not that there are so many documents to follow for the education standards, it is the length of the documents and the details that are involved in them. The city of Hampton uses the national standards of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the state Standards of Learning (SOL's) and the local curriculum guides for the individual subjects. This does not seem too intimidating; at least until you see the size of the guides, but once they are opened, it is not quite as bad as it looks. Since here in Hampton, everything is based off of the SOL's and the SOL's.

In each of the guides, there are the normal sub-sections, achievement standards for the students, the education standards for the teachers and local standards for both so expectations are well-known. It may not seem at all simple to find this information at first, but it is in there. For example, the Hampton City Schools Mathematics Curriculum Guide for Third Grade is an overwhelming 164 pages long; that is just for one grade level and just one subject for that grade level. Now, imagine that, and/or more, for Language Arts, Social Studies/Sciences and Science for each and every elementary grade in Hampton. The next step is to understand how to read the guides. Hampton provides a pacing guide that is broken up by semesters and then by weeks. Within the pacing guide, the units and skills are listed in the order to be taught to the students and the objectives for minimum student proficiency; for example, the students must be able to define and comprehend map related vocabulary, identify and label the parts of a map, the ability to locate Virginia on a map of the United States and locate the United States on a world map. The pacing guide provided by Hampton acts as the roadmap for educators to use in reading and understanding the curriculum guide that is based on the SOL's and the NCLB standards at the state and national levels.

Through the use of the use of the materials provided to the educators in the city of Hampton, navigation and understanding of the expectations and objectives is clear. The individual guides and handbooks alone will not, and cannot, be understood with out a bottle of water and a bottle of aspirin. The NCLB standards alone provide the states with the minimum objectives and regulations that students are expected to understand, but those objectives and regulations are very broad. Each state is then given the freedom to adapt and arrange the objectives and regulations to suit the environment of the education in that state, but still remain in the same form as the national guidelines. From there, the localities/cities arrange their objectives and regulations within the state guidelines based on national guidelines. It all comes around in the end, except it seems that this time the little guy (the localities/cities) actually has the last, intelligible, word.

References:

Hampton City Schools. Department of Mathematics. (2006-2007) Elementary Mathematics Third Grade Curriculum Guide.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2006, retrieved January 31, 2007 from http://ntcm.org

UCLA, National Center for History in the Schools, 2005, retrieved January 31, 2007 from

http://nchs.ucla.edu/standards/

United States Department of Education, 2006, retrieved January 31, 2007 from http://ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml

Virginia Department of Education, retrieved January 31, 2007 from http://www.pen.k12.va.us/VDOE/