I too tend to have a jaundiced view of this most recent national education standards.

It is not because I am against national education standards; no, it is because enacting such a policy would require overcoming incredible political, administrative, and legal hurdles. I’ve addressed some of the issues here: http://kevinrkosar.com/wordpress/?p=877

Cheers,

Kevin R. Kosar
Author, Failing Grades: The Federal Politics of Education Standards (Rienner, 2005)

Respectfully, I predict that the final draft will be out within two months, be very similar to what has already been released, and be quickly adopted by 25 to 30 other states–most of which will also not receive RTTT funding.

The remaining states will go their own way–and most of them will set their sights much lower than Kentucky and the others who adopt the common core.

That seems likely since (in theory) the fed’s don’t have the same incentive to lower their standards over time. States on the other hand do have an incentive to waterdown standards since they’re the ones writing the tests and holding themselves accountable.

Would love to hear your thoughts Jay.

It’s true that states already have standards, but if they are bad at least they aren’t imposed on everyone. And states with bad standards have to compete with (and can learn from) states that have better standards. If we have national standards there is no more laboratory of the states. There is only uniform banality.

That said, I don’t believe that the federal or state governments should be in the business of telling local districts what to do (or be offering huge incentives for policy change as in RttT). We need to keep opening the gates of choice and transparency at the local level and free our national and state Blue Ribbon commissions on curriculum and pedagogy from politics and policy.

Checker, let’s leave aside for now the quality of the draft standards. Even if the standards are acceptable, the issue as you noted two weeks ago is “whether the tests supposed to be aligned with them will be up to the challenge, or whether the ‘passing scores’ on those tests will be high or low, [and] how this entire apparatus will be sustained over the long haul.” Nothing has happened in the last two weeks that should reassure you on any of those issues.

My biggest concern is how this plays out over time. Once you build a national standards machine, what makes you think that you will remain at the controls over time even if you are driving when the process starts? I can’t even understand your confidence that maybe the standards will get better over this three week comment period, let alone over the next three decades.

The political reality is that the edublob and its taste for low and silly standards are much more likely to prevail than the good things that you or Don Hirsch may want.

A more fundamental reality is that we have too big, too decentralized, and too diverse of a country to impose a single set of quality standards on everyone. To form a majority coalition those standards will inevitably be watered-down and distorted, if anything can be adopted at all.

Nor is it persuasive to suggest that states shouldn’t adopt these standards if they aren’t really better. If it really were so voluntary, then the same forces preventing them from better standards now will prevent them from adopting quality national standards even if they are offered. The non-participants in a truly voluntary scenario (assuming good national standards) should be the bad states, not the good ones.

But as we both know, this national standards push is not really voluntary. The feds already condition funds on states accepting the standards. And there is talk of expanding those conditions to include Title I or more. Everyone understands that more federal coercion is likely if these standards get off the ground.

I’m not opposed to quality standards and my taste in standards largely coincides with yours. But the only way we’ll get those kinds of standards is if we allow standards to be set at the school, local, or state level with competition rewarding or sanctioning those who choose good or bad standards.

I also suspect that I am more pluralistic about standards than you are. There are likely many different quality sets of standards that schools could adopt, and we will obliterate that diversity, choice, and competition if we impose too much from the center.

I understand your attraction to having a set of quality national standards, but I think you are making political miscalculations about how all of this will turn out.

Checker says:
Jay, try reading the draft standards yourself rather than listening to the grumps and crotchets that surround you. No, they’re not perfect (and some people now fill their days and earn their livings taking shots at them) but they’re pretty darned good, better than those of the overwhelming majority of states. States that don’t find them superior ought not adopt them. And maybe they’ll be better after repairs are made at the end of the current comment period. But no, I haven’t lost my mind. What I did instead was read the standards themselves rather than just reading peoples’ opinions about them.
PS: Fordham’s experts’ detailed reviews will be out next week.