STANDARDS-Program, Content or Both: How Will This Affect Agricultural Education Practice?

Now that is a question for the profession! Will our current efforts with program and content standards make a difference? Will the funding spent on development of standards at state and national levels impact the education of agricultural education students sitting in classrooms across the nation? Will we look back in ten years and see this as a tipping point in the quality and growth of agricultural education programs across the country, or will we view this work as just another flash in the pan effort that we've seen too often in the past? I doubt if anyone, regardless of pay grade, knows the answers to these questions. What we do know is that we now have, for the first time ever, national standards at the program and content level for agricultural education. The impact of these two documents will be determined, not by national leaders and staff, but by state staff and local teachers. If we do nothing to implement or merge national standards with our state documents or encourage our teachers to utilize them in local program planning, then, these too will become items of the aged trivial pursuit /remember when game that we so often play in our meetings and conferences. We hold the key to the success of program and content standards and control whether they are implemented or not. So, as a former Local Program Success Specialist for National FFA, new State Program Director for Agriculture, and most importantly, a 27-year-veteran of the agriculture classroom, I offer my perspective on why and how National Quality Program Standards (NQPS) could be addressed at the state level. We have read and heard many times, over the past year, about the structure of the NQPS documents. Designed around the seven keys of local program success, containing 10 standard statements with 80 quality indicators, this document provides the expectation for the structure of quality agricultural education programs. Written in a format that provides the opportunity to score the local program at one of five levels of performance for each of the 80 standards, this tool is the most comprehensive listing of program expectations ever created at the national level. It has the potential to raise the quality of programs across the nation, if used properly. Implemented improperly, it could result in creating more problems than it solves. Place a 65 page document in front of a teacher who is already feeling overwhelmed by his/her job, and the result could be disastrous. We observed this in real life last year in a workshop at the NAAE national convention. After a 50-minute presentation about NQPS, in which participants completed just two of the 10 standard statements, a veteran teacher who is respected in his state for his program quality and teaching ability, told us the process made him feel like a failure. That is not the way to start program improvement. It's understood that we need to increase our teachers' awareness of the total program and the components required to accomplish it. What we don't want to do in the process is increase their anxiety level and push them toward leaving the profession. Colorado is involved with a pilot project provided by the National Council & LPS staff to implement NQPS and will be taking the process state-wide in January. Our implementation will duplicate the steps utilized by LPS with the five initial pilot schools. Key to the process is an awareness that local program improvement is not the sole responsibility of the teacher. Because of this we will not allow our teachers to go through the NQPS improvement tool process by themselves. Discussion of the process and the content of the standards document will happen at our winter agriculture teacher meetings. This will provide our teachers with awareness and better understanding of the how's and why's of the NQPS improvement process. The actual scoring of their program on the quality indicators will happen at regional meetings where the teacher, administrator, and local advisory committee chairman work as a team to fill the document out. …