Know your audience
Yesterday, on Threads (that's Instagram's version of X, formerly known as Twitter), I came across a very interesting post about the Tennessee Department of Education. It said that they released a survey for families to provide feedback on their English Language Arts standards for students. For those of you who aren't familiar, standards are descriptions of what students should be able to know and do at various points in their education. Standards guide what teachers teach and what schools test... they define what students learn at school!
As someone who has spent a lot of time working in education, I was immediately intrigued. So, naturally, I clicked to view the survey. In the introduction, I learned that the State Board of Education reviews the standards at least every eight years and "[t]he first step in the review process is a survey open to all Tennesseans across our state."
Now, I happen to have designed a number of surveys about education intended for families and the broader public. These types of surveys are notoriously difficult to design because one must take such care to use accessible language. To get good data, people need to understand the question.
I LOVE that Tennessee wants to get everyone more involved in their education system. I think a public survey for their citizens is a great idea; I also think the survey they have launched is a complete and utter waste of time.
There are a lot of questions, but they follow the same format. Here's what the first one looks like:
After reading that (if your eyes didn't glaze over) can you see why maybe these aren't the right types of questions for the public? For Families?
Firstly, if I wanted feedback on something super technical, like standards, I would want it from people who are familiar with the standards and teaching, people who have a better chance of knowing what the standards mean. People like teachers!
For the broader public and families to weigh-in on what students should learn at school, you must craft much simpler questions that would make it easy for anyone to share meaningful insights. For instance, Tennessee could take each standard and translate it into one (or more, because some standards are lengthy!) plain, simply written sentences that describe what the standard means. Then, it could give people a list of skills and say:
"Think about what you believe is most important for students to learn in English Language Arts (reading, writing, listening, and speaking). How important are each of the following skills?"
People could then rate each skill in terms of importance: Not at All, A Little, Somewhat, Very.
If they want to know what grades people think each skill should be taught in (side eye because, in my opinion, this is ridiculous), then they should list all their simply written skills and have people assign specific grades to them. Or, group the simply written skills by the grades they are currently taught in, and ask people to say if they think the skill need to be taught earlier or later.
Asking that people:
Understand the standards as written;
Have an understanding of what students can or should be able to do in each grade;
Or, even know off the top of their head how old students are in each grade (I have to look this up all the time!)
is comical. Are people really equipped to answer these questions?!
No way.
Know. Your. Audience.
Families should have a say on what their kiddos learn (in my opinion) but this is not how to get their input.
Would you use data from a survey like this? To make decisions about what students should learn and when?
Missed opportunities like this make me sad. Great intentions wanting to engage more people in public education, exceedingly poor execution. I could imagine such a cool and interesting survey here. I would've written one, but I'd need a few teachers to translate those standards for me first :)
