It was relatively easy to acquire the Iowa district’s standards and benchmarks since they are readily available in the Iowa department of education website. The website contains the exact standards and benchmarks that should be maintained in every school within the district, and the core content standards in reading, math, and science that should be observed within the entire state. These content standards mainly focus on what knowledge and skills the students should obtain in their learning period. The standards and benchmarks got enacted through the Iowa legislature in 2007 passed by the senate file 588 (Iowa Department of Education, 2010).
The standards and benchmarks are not readily available in the school’s website but can be accessed in the Iowa department of education website and other district departments. The district standards have a lot of similarities with the Iowa’s state standards and benchmarks in fact they are based on Iowa’s state standards. For instance a subject like math, the content standards for the district and also for the state is that students should be able to understand and apply a different math concept. The content standards are aimed at identifying the knowledge and skills that students should obtain within the period of their study. The benchmarks are created to ensure a learning target for the learning duration between grades3-5 (Iowa Department of Education, 2010). According to the benchmarks, students learning a subject like literature should be able to fully understand the different literary and informational texts that they are reading.
Teachers in Iowa school districts must also meet a certain standard of quality. The standards should math the set standards of Iowa State which got enacted through the Iowa legislature (Ames, 2010). The teachers are supposed to be guided by a curriculum which focuses on benefitting the student by giving the student the required knowledge and skills.
