National Standards Closer to Reality

Abstract

Twenty years after President George H.W. Bush and the nation's governors ventured a cautious challenge to the long tradition of local control in public education--establishing a national goal that students demonstrate competency in core subjects--we're headed toward voluntary national standards and testing in public education. There's been so much momentum in that direction in Washington recently that what would amount to a sweeping shift in policy has hardly rated a headline. The President and Secretary of Education Duncan have publicly praised the idea. Having 50 different goalposts is absolutely ridiculous, Duncan said of the state standards required by the No Child Left Behind Act in an address to the American Council on Education. And he has signaled that there's hundreds of millions of dollars in federal stimulus money waiting for state leaders who step forward to craft common tests built on higher standards. Duncan is working closely with two organizations representing key stakeholders--the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the education policy arm of the National Governors Association (NGA). They've called on states to demand more from their schools in the name of a stronger workforce and greater economic competitiveness by voluntarily adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12. An astonishing 49 states and territories already have signed onto the initiative. Leaders in the philanthropic community, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, also have joined the common standards campaign, as have influential civil rights groups like the Education Trust and education policy voices on both the left (the Center for American Progress) and the right (the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation). And a key congressional player, George Miller, the California Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Education and Labor, signaled his support earlier this year when he held a hearing titled Strengthening America's Competitiveness Through Common Academic Standards, where witnesses called for fewer, tougher standards over the vast and vague expectation of many states today. Logic of National Standards The logic of national public school standards and tests is compelling. The reading, writing, and math skills students need don't vary a whole lot from California to Kansas, particularly when many of today's increasingly global employers are able to tap digitally into talent wherever they find it. Even with the inevitable fights over evolution and creationism and over some parts of the cultural canon, the same is mostly true for some subjects, such as science and history. And how schools teach would be left to them. On the testing side of the equation, the inefficiency of 51 redundant state testing systems is obvious. The nation's testing infrastructure suffers from a severe lack of funding and expertise, and moving to common standards and assessments would permit the creation of a smaller number of higher-quality tests. Traditionally, politics have trumped these arguments. President Bush proposed the creation of voluntary national standards in elementary and secondary education in the early 1990s, and the Clinton Administration sought voluntary national tests in the mid-1990s. But partisan politics and strong philosophical opposition from both the Left and the Right combined to sink the proposals on Capitol Hill. Liberals argued that the tests would be unfair to students in impoverished communities, while conservatives argued that national standards and testing would amount to a federalization of public schooling. But No Child Left Behind transformed the policy landscape. It established standards, tests, and the holding of local educators accountable for results as a cornerstone of school reform. And its federal mandate for standards and testing nationwide dealt a strong psychological blow to the tradition of local educational control, particularly since the law was proposed by a conservative Republican president and approved by a Republican-controlled Congress--traditional opponents of centripetal forces in policy making. …