Developing Educational Standards - Family and Consumer Sciences

Family and Consumer Sciences

Developing Educational Standards is maintained by Charles Hill and the Wappingers Central School District in New York. Your help with updates or corrections is greatly appreciated. [This page was last updated on December 9, 2001]

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Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory (McREL)
The Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory is one of the best places to go on the net for educational resources, particularly in the area of standards and frameworks. Some of its best offerings include:
- Content Knowledge - 3rd Edition, - a compilation of standards from a variety of state and national projects, searchable by subject, grade, and keyword. McREL also has a similar set of Career Standareds.
- The McREL Standards Consortium - a collaboration between McREL and close to 20 schools from throughout the country that are looking to focus instruction on standards.
- A variety of Content Standards guides and studies, most of which you can download as text or Adobe Acrobat files.
National Coalition for Family and Consumer Sciences Education
The National Coalition for Family and Consumer Sciences Education has developed sixteen National Standards covering such topics as the family, foods, and human development. Each standard also has several general performance indicators along with it. (Thanks to Barbara Woods, President of the National Association of State Administrators for Family and Consumer Sciences for information about this link.]
National Council on Economic Education
The National Council on Economic Education maintains an Economics America site and has helped issue a set of Voluntary National Content Standards for Economic Education. This contains 20 content standards, a supplementary handbook, various online lesson plans, and ordering information for the whole document. Covering grades three through twelve, the online lessons can be searched by standard, title, grade, or concept. Each lesson is fully described and is linked back to one of the economic standards.
National Education Goals Panel
The National Education Goals Panel was set up to monitor progress towards achieving America's Education Goals. Using its Interactive Data Center, you can see how your state is doing, compare a state to the nation, or set up state-to-state comparisons. The site also has a Standards and Assessments publications page with free ordering instructions and download links for quite a few documents. In addition, you can sign up to receive weekly and monthly email updates of what the panel sees as progress toward achieving the national goals.
US Department of Education
The US Department of Education has its own search site that allows you to search the department, any of its agency web sites. It also maintains a searchable set of research summaries of ERIC Digests from 1992 to the present. Typing in the word "standards" turns up documents about such topics as social studies, the public perception of standards, and standardized tests.

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California
The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing offers a wealth of information about teacher certification requirements and procedures. Its section on Standards for Educator Preparation and Competence includes links to teaching credential standards in general and to specific subject area and specialist standards. (Thanks to Bob Salley of CTC for this information.)
California
The California Instructional Technology Clearinghouse maintains an impressive and comprehensive databaseof more than 3700 instructional materials linked to state standards and curriculum frameworks. You can search the database by keyword, subject, platorm, or grade level - or dig down into the areas of ELA, math, science, or social studies and do a search on individual standards. The results generally lead you to highly rated software titles (the rating criteria are described on the web site). (Thanks to Laurie Swiryn of Cuesta Technologies for information about this link.)
New York
NYCENet, the New York City Educational NETwork has an Educational Resources page containing links to various city frameworks. In general, the links take you to lists of "curriculum frameworks expectations" for elementary, middle, and high school grades. Each "expectation" has a link to a relevant net site and some brief plans about what students should do at that site. This approach looks very helpful for teachers and most of the sites and plans are good, but teachers should explore the sites ahead of time, do their own detailed planning, and read the cautionary notes that accompany some of the site descriptions.
New York
In collaboration with the New York State Education Department, OCM BOCES (the Onondaga-Cortland-Madison BOCES Regional Information Center) maintains a State Learning Standards site that offers quick access to NYS standards, frameworks, and assessment resources for the arts; career development and occupational studies; English language arts; health, physical education, and home economics; math, science, and technology; and social studies. Checking on the Planned Assessment of New York State Standards page on a regular basis may also be a good idea, as the time and grades of their administration still appears open to some changes.
New York
The New York State Academy for Teaching and Learning promotes the development of standards-based student "learning experiences" and the assessment of the plans that underly those experiences through a peer review process. This site has the basic NY standards and is building a searchable database that will link learning experiences with state standards.
New York
The Office of Elementary, Middle, Secondary and Continuing Education portion of the New York State Education Department's site contains links to learning standards, frameworks, assessment samplers, and resource guides in the core subjects. Most documents are in Adobe Acrobat format. One of the most recent is a September 2001 Educational Framework for Interscholastic Athletic Programs. A second fall document seeks to provide an overview of the framework implementation process. Meanwhile, studies of what has worked and what still needs work regarding classroom implementation of the state's standards appear on a separateResearch and Evaluation page.
North Dakota
The VT Programs and Functions portion of the North Dakota State Board for Vocational and Technical Education's web site offers information about courses in the areas of family and consumer sciences, occupational education, and technology education. The information varies from brief course descriptions to lists of expected student outcomes. None of it is particularly extensive.
Pennsylvania
In 1999, Pennsylvania began a major revision to its academic standards. Proposed social studies, FACS, health and PE, arts and humanities, and science and technology standards can be downloaded from a Proposed Academic Standards site. The new, adopted ELA and math standards are incorporated into and can be downloaded from Chapter 4 of State Board of Education Regulations. Career Education and world languages standards appear to be under development.
Rhode Island
The Standards, Instruction, and Student Assessment portion of the Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's site contains recommended content and performance standards for the Arts, ELA, FACS, health, math, and science.
Texas
The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills portion of the Texas Education Agency's site contains TEKS for high school courses and for each grade from kindergarten through grade 5, for ELA, math, science, social studies, second language, health and PE, fine arts, various career education programs, FACS, and technology.
Utah
The Utah Education Network has thestandards for the state's Core Curriculum on line. A Core Curriculum/Course Descriptions page has links to documents for major subject areas, with individual documents for grades K to 6 and documents for the secondary grades that are either grouped by grade or by topic. A typical document describes a course, lists core standards, and briefly describes student objectives that meet each standard. UEN also has a very strong set of links to Internet resources as well as to its own set of lesson plans (including a searchable Curriculum Database). A similar set of core curriculum resources is available from the Utah Department of Education's Curriculum and Instruction Homepage (some of which include links back to UEN's pages). Additional information in the areas of occupational, family and consumer sciences, and technology education appear on the Applied Technology Education page.(Thanks go to Ginny Gale from the UtahLink/Utah Education Network, June Matheson from the Utah State Office of Education, and Virgil Jacobsen from the Alpine School District in American Fork, Utah for UEN updates.)
Utah
The Curriculum Educational Resources portion of the Utah State Office of Education's site contains core curriculum, including content standards and (in some cases) links to related lessons in the areas of the arts, second language, health and PE, educational technology, ELA, library media, math, science, social studies, FACS, and occupational educaiton.
Wisconsin
The Wisconsin Model Academic Standards portion of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction's site contains web pages for the ELA, math, science, and social studies standards; links to Adobe Acrobat files for all others.

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