So F. Scott said to blog about it

I'm stressed out.

Here's the problem: I'm a member of a state-level committee to rewrite our standards for reading and writing. I've been working with this committee for months. We are up against our final deadline, but we need more time.

Standards documents have never been more high stakes. The results of the assessments tied to them are having more and more real implications for schools, students, and teachers--some even tied to school funding and teacher pay.

That means that standards documents have got to be very carefully constructed: coherent, clear, carrying high expectations for students and teachers. Anything short of this could have catastrophic consequences that we can't even see clearly now.

So why am I stressed out? My fellow committee members and I have built a document that we really want to believe in, but it is not quite there yet. We need more time, and we are not getting it. The whole process has been fraught with unreasonable deadlines and assurances that we would later have the time to do the alignment and articulation work that the document desperately needs.

But we are not getting the support from our department of education to do this right. In fact, I was pretty much told not to even come in tomorrow to work on it--perhaps they think that I'll muddy the process because of my desire to make the document as strong as possible, to do the major big picture articulation with the document that will take more time than the smaller tweaks that the department of education imagined for the document at this point in the game.

It seems that the goal here is no longer on building a strong and visionary standards document that will take my state boldly into the 21st century. It seems that the goal has now become simply a finished document.

Time to get my mind off of this and try to get some grading done.
M. Shelley