Having recommended the creation of voluntary national standards and tests in 2007, the Commission agrees with other commenters that adopting, teaching to, and measuring against well-designed common standards will improve the quality and equity of education not only across state lines, but also economic and racial lines. Research shows that the differentiation among state standards can result in a gap as large as an entire grade level of student achievement.  Low and uneven standards are putting students at an incredible disadvantage. In far too many states, it is possible for students to meet expectations on state assessments, only to find themselves unprepared for college-level work or entry-level job requirements.   High-quality common standards aligned to college- and work-readiness will ensure that all students—regardless of zip code—learn what they need to succeed beyond graduation.

The Commission is pleased that nearly all states have joined together for the first phase of the Common Core Standards Initiative and that support for the concept of common standards is growing considerably. While the Commission will leave the grading of the draft standards to subject matter experts, we believe it is vital that there be a mechanism for comparing the final common standards and correlating assessments to those of any states that ultimately choose not to participate. The Commission recommended this check and balance to ensure that there is meaningful transparency about the relative rigor of standards and tests in states that choose not to participate in any common effort. For those that claim they are staying out because their own expectations are more rigorous, such a public comparison will offer either proof or pressure to raise them. 

The Commission believes it is critical that this important effort not be advanced at the expense of NCLB requirements for continued accountability for results in improving student achievement. While we do the hard work of developing and implementing rigorous common core standards and tests, we must keep our eye on the ball, and not let setting a new target distract us from continued urgency for improving student performance now. 

Additionally, if we set high standards but do not give students and teachers the tools to meet them or hold schools accountable for helping them get there, then the efforts of designing and implementing these standards are useless. Adopting common standards should not be seen as an excuse to do less, but rather as an opportunity to do more.

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Only thirteen posts this week. I think that’s the fewest we’ve ever had. Either everyone was off on one of those fall leaf-watching trips or standards just aren’t nearly as interesting as they used to be. I’ll bet on the latter.

We’ve gotten quite comfortable it seems with standards as the leading edge of education reform. We all know the theory: standards drive tests which drive accountability which drive teachers to change practice which produces higher test scores which tell us kids are learning. Seems straightforward enough. But two writers this week offered cautionary tales.

Mr. Kress used the familiar Whack-a-Mole analogy to point out how long and tortuous the trip can be from standards to student achievement. Standards-based reform is subject to many a random detour or unexpected interruption, some political, some practical. Mr. Sciarra reminded us that standards by themselves achieve nothing at all; it’s teaching that gets the job done.

Because it’s fun to make baseball analogies in October, I’d like to point out that coming up to The Show here from Single-A classroom ball, I tend to think about standards more like a slugger takes his 500 cuts every season. That is to say, I’m looking for every little advantage I can get on a day-by-day basis, anything that will raise my average. Standards make me feel like I forgot to remove the donut I was using when I was taking practice swings in the on-deck circle: I feel constrained and weighed down; I’m too slow getting around; I can’t match my bat to the balls being thrown my way.

Let’s be honest: standards are constraints. And the way I see them used in schools across the country often horrifies me. Now, I know there are right ways and wrong ways to use standards. But most schools I visit choose wrong ways.

Case in point: SWBAT (pronounced “swuh-BAT”). It means “Students will be able to…” and it’s scratched on chalkboards all over our nation. Principals or districts require that a given standard be put on the board during each class. And that the teacher will “teach the standard” to the kids.

In this situation, what I usually see is a poorly conceived and delivered lesson that glosses the standard and is entirely irrelevant to the students. Most important of all, the choice of lesson and standard has nothing to do with assessment information gathered by the teacher prior to conceiving the teaching. That is to say, there’s no “learning” rationale; standards alone are the rationale.

So here’s my cautionary tale: the best teaching decisions are based on the best assessment made as close in time to the teaching as possible. Personally, I try to base Tuesday’s teaching on what I observe on Monday. Apply the previous day’s assessment makes sure I’m at my best, most responsive to student needs, and most likely to hit one out of the park.

With regard to standards my motto is, “Teach the student not the standard.” This may be sacrilegious in the Age of Standards but it’s based on one the most solid tenets of the Age of Assessment.

My point here is that disseminating standards without aligning their use with best practice in assessment and instruction leads to the poor and inefficient use of standards in most classrooms. We also need to acknowledge that standards discourage differentiation and daily anecdotal assessment, and give many teachers the false notion that covering curriculum is more important than creating learning.

 

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The work that has been done on Common Core Standards has the potential to provide teachers with far more manageable curriculum goals.  Their broadness allows teachers to exercise professional judgment in planning instruction that promotes student success. As the standards are extended to grades K–12, NEA is optimistic that they will continue to be broader and more challenging than most of the current state standards.

I believe that it is critically important that the voice of the education practitioner is included in the development of all core standards. NEAhas been active in helping to develop these standards and remains an advocate of including other essential areas of schooling, such as civic responsibility, in education transformation efforts. We also believe it is critical that standards and assessments associated with them promote access for all students to a complete education.

As to the quality of the recently released draft of the standards, I don't feel ready to opine. I look forward to studying them carefully and  reviewing others' judgments as well. Personally, I'm very curious to see how they square with the college readiness standards we adopted in Texas after a multi-year process established by our Legislature. It'll be interesting to see if we "renegades" in Texas are far off from the "common" direction here. (By the way, I tend to doubt it.)

But I want to spend a moment pursuing a few thoughts triggered by Representative Kline's comments.

In a sense, I wonder if this is a bit like a complex game of whack-a-mole. Many seem to think that if we just get to common standards we'll be fine. I don't believe that to be true.

First, getting to common, ACTUAL k-12 standards across the states will be a much heavier lift than putting out the broad objectives for college readiness. I know the sponsors of this work know this is so, and I believe they know how steep the next part of the climb will be.

But, the climb keeps getting steeper. Let's say that the states go the miraculous next step and agree to common k-12 standards; what about assessments? Will they agree to common assessments? If they don't, of course, the taught objectives will, by the very nature of the enterprise, end up varying wildly from the stated objectives. That alone will prevent achieving the goal.

But let's say they do. What's the next mole that pops up? Of course, it's whether the states will also agree to common performance standards. I know a state well that, for example, has pre-algebra math standards for the 8th grade, and it even has a few relevant items on its 8th grade math test. BUT the passing standard on the test is set a level at which the student can get by answering none of these items correctly. So, actually the teaching and learning of pre-algebra content is, in fact, not that important to the state. So, how meaningful in the real world are their standards regarding pre-algebra? Sadly, not very. 

OK, let's assume the states whack this mole; what's the next one? Must the states rate the schools on the basis of their students achieving to these common standards? I have a state in mind, despite the supposedly horrid impact of NCLB, where 61% of the schools are rated exemplary or recognized. This is the case even though significant percentages of students aren't learning to the old low standards, much less the sort of standards we're all talking about in this discussion. When a reformer recently went to a local chamber of commerce trying to promote higher standards, he was dismissed entirely with this view: "We don't know what you're talking about. Virtually all our schools are outstanding."

I sense all this talk must raise the hair on the back of Representative Kline's neck, but won't the common standards movement have to whack the mole of low criteria for rating schools if it is serious about the actual teaching and learning to high, common standards? Won't the feds have to insist on states' whacking all these moles and more before they condition funding on state action on standards?

Here's the fundamental problem: how far do the feds go? if they don't go very far, the states will beat them at whack-a-mole. If they go far enough to keep the moles down, Representative Kline and his colleagues will face a nightmare of abused federalism like they've never seen before.

(It isn't as if the vast majority of both Republicans and Democrats who put NCLB together were stupid to the realities of challenging the states while living within our federalist system. Sigh.)

Suffice to say, there are yet more moles. And, if any one of them or those mentioned above pops up, we lose, though we may feel better "for having tried something." I won't try to cover them all, but here are a few of the big ones: 1) How much will we actually help teachers teach to the higher standards?, 2) Where will we find and deploy the best teachers in big numbers to teach the Physics and the Algebra II and the English IV in the schools that largely serve disadvantaged students, 3) Is there an accompanying initiative to do effective interventions to bring the many students who are currently failing at lower bars to a readiness to study to higher standards, and 4) Despite the common words on the page, how, at bottom, can we know that the taught standards in Jefferson High will be the same, or even close to the same, as those taught across the tracks in Hamilton High?

I want to be clear. I applaud the work that is going on and the people who are doing it, and I will certainly do what I can to help. But if all these complex matters aren't handled with thoroughness, alignment, and fidelity, we will make little difference on this journey.

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National standards will end the unintended race-to-the-bottom which disproportionately impacts college and career preparation for low income and minority students.  They will also ease expansion of high quality charter school operators and provide investment incentive for digital content development. Specifically, a common core will allow development of a library of open and proprietary learning objects with smart recommendation engines supported by aligned student, teacher, and school supports--perhaps several version each supported by philanthropic and venture capital. 

Virtually everyone agrees that to achieve success, one needs to set ambitious goals. This is true in life, and it’s true in our schools. States and local communities are constantly grappling with the best and most effective strategies to help their students strive for excellence, and one of the avenues being explored is the movement toward common standards as a baseline for educational attainment.

Common standards have great potential to raise the bar and change the culture – but common standards must not be confused with federal standards.  The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an example worth watching. I think the movement toward voluntary, non-federal common standards is a step in the right direction, and I applaud state and school leaders who decide to come together to find common solutions to their shared challenges.

However, I must express a note of caution. All too often, federal involvement can hamper innovation, stifle creativity, and slow down reform under the weight of bureaucracy.  While the Common Core State Standards Initiative has been spearheaded by state and school leaders – and not the federal government – the policies being pursued by the U.S. Department of Education should raise warning flags for those concerned that common standards will put us on the path toward federal standards.

Already, the Department has made adherence to common standards a requirement for those states wishing to apply for Race to the Top funding. The Department is also planning to fund efforts by states to adopt these common standards. The link between federal grant funds and voluntary core subject matter standards is troubling, and should give pause to those who support the independence of this initiative. Unfortunately, if history is any guide, it may only be a matter of time before the federal government inserts its decision making authority into the development of these standards, or makes their application mandatory, instead of voluntary.

If anything, the development of rigorous, common academic standards should allow the federal government to back itself out of the standards debate. We can use our bully pulpit to press states and local communities to strive for excellence without giving the federal government authority to dictate the day-to-day nuances of what is being taught in our classrooms.

As for the quality of the standards themselves – as a federal lawmaker, I don’t believe that’s for me to judge.

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It seems we haven’t learned a key lesson from the decade-long experience with 50 state content and performance standards. National content standards alone, like their state counterparts, will do little to improve educational quality and performance in public schools serving the nation’s high poverty, high minority neighborhoods and communities, no matter how well written.   As the New Jersey Supreme Court in Abbott v. Burke so cogently observed 11 years ago when state officials suggested that common curriculum standards were a credible substitute for the resources needed to deliver them, “the standards themselves do not ensure any substantive level of achievement. Real improvement still depends on the sufficiency of educational resources, successful teaching, effective supervision, efficient administration, and a variety of other academic, environmental, and societal factors needed to assure a sound education.”

Most critically, the Court noted “content standards cannot answer the fundamental inquiry” of whether the state school funding system “assures the level of resources needed” to enable students in high poverty districts to achieve those standards.

High poverty schools are in low wealth communities – urban and rural.  These schools, which have the greatest need, are seriously under-funded by most existing state school finance systems. They are also under-resourced in key areas such as the ability to attract and retain effective teachers, and to provide high quality preschool to close early development gaps.

To provide any real leverage for systemic educational improvement, national content standards would have to be accompanied by enforceable opportunity to learn standards.   Aligning state curriculum is far from enough, and to even suggest it is only feeds illusions that erode support for public education. States must be pressed to show that they have a credible system in place to fund low income students and schools equitably and fairly, and to provide critical resources including high quality preschool and safe and educationally adequate facilities. And if they have opportunity to learn gaps, as they do, states must demonstrate how and when they will close them. Otherwise, the common standards will be just another top-down mandate, this time from a top that’s even further removed from the ground where our teachers and students struggle on.

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Arne Duncan has said that NCLB got it wrong by being tightly prescriptive at the local level (a cascade of requirements and consequences) but  loosey-goosey at the national level (allowing wide variation in state definitions of “proficiency.”) He’d like to flip that structure and create voluntary common “career and college-ready” standards, while leaving the means of pursuing them to local folks. The task for the Common Core project is to level the playing field so that proficiency means the same thing in Mississippi as in Massachusetts. 

The current draft effort has much to admire, including the nifty presentation of academic evidence and state/international benchmarks. There’s a whiff of over-synthesis in the language, reflecting the strain of keeping all the participants happy, but in general the draft presents straightforward statements of what a high school graduate should know and be able to do. Problem is, you can’t test a seventh-grader on a high school exit exam – so at the next stage the project will try to translate these broad outcome statements into grade-by-grade standards that can form the basis for state assessments. Choices will have to be made about when to teach what, and we’ll start seeing fissures in the broad consensus.

There is a special sensitivity around this topic in the charter movement, whose members live by the bargain of “accountability for autonomy.”   As public schools, charters are subject to the standards and assessments of each state, as well as federal laws such as the ESEA. But by virtue of their charter autonomy, they’re free to try diverse paths – for example, arranging science courses in a different sequence from district-run schools or teaching algebra-1 a year earlier. Will a new standards regime allow them to keep trying new things?

This is why the Common Core project should produce standards that are appropriately specific and demanding, but measurable according to a variety of paces and course sequences, perhaps even articulating them by a grade span rather than a single grade. To get more prescriptive will produce the same kind of reaction we saw in Arizona, where a charter-friendly state superintendent, waving the standards banner, tried to mandate that charters follow the same year-by-year curriculum as other public schools. The resulting lawsuit was settled but the wariness about standards lingers on.

Charters are just the most obvious example of tension between any “common” standard - -however voluntary in terms of state-level participation – and tactical decisions that rightly belong to local educators. If the national effort is to pay off, I hope the Common Core project proceeds judiciously. The project should try to solve the evaluation problem the Secretary has identified, but not to create another layer of national prescription about means.

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The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an unprecedented national effort to raise student achievement to a college- and career-ready level, bringing together governors and state commissioners of education from 48 states to develop a common core of state standards in English language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. 

Higher education must be involved in order for the standards to realize their full potential as a tool for increased student achievement.  If the standards are embraced by higher education, a huge opportunity opens to create a much more seamless pathway for students from high school into college.

If faculty believe that the standards have been well vetted by their peers and deemed credible by the appropriate disciplinary organizations, colleges and universities will be more likely to endorse the standards and to adapt their admissions and placement policies to reflect the standards—and the assessments that will eventually accompany them.

If colleges and universities validate that the Common Core standards accurately represent the knowledge and skills that students must possess to succeed in higher education, it will be much easier for the Common Core to gain acceptance among key stakeholders such as business leaders, parents and local school boards. Students also will be more likely to take the standards seriously if they see the connection between these standards and the admissions and placement requirements of colleges and universities.

To facilitate review of the college- and career-ready standards under the tight timeframe of the Common Core Initiative, the American Council on Education (ACE) is partnering with the Conference Board on the Mathematical Sciences and the Modern Language Association. These disciplinary organizations have named expert panels to review the standards during a one-month open comment period from mid-September to mid-October. The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the organizations directing the initiative, have assured us that these concerns will receive their serious consideration as they finalize the standards.

ACE hopes to issue a statement at the conclusion of this process endorsing the standards development and vetting process. ACE will provide a wide range of disciplinary and higher education leadership associations an opportunity to sign on to this public statement.

As states proceed to adopt the Common Core standards in 2010, ACE will partner with other higher education organizations to disseminate information about standards to colleges and universities and to facilitate conversations within higher education and between higher education and elementary/secondary education about the implications of these standards for higher education.

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It is difficult to evaluate any set of educational standards out of context. Standards only prove their value in concert with tests, curriculum, instruction, and, finally, students. That being said, Common Core’s draft standards in reading and writing are easy to understand and mercifully brief.

Of course, the existence of standards implies that other things will come along soon to greet them. And this is where we have to ask ourselves, “What are we going to do differently this time than we did the last time?” Because, let’s face it, folks, we didn’t do so well last time; we have little to show for the past ten years of the standards movement other than 50 states-worth of unreliable test data.

Currently, we have 50 different sets of state standards. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that we have 50 different state tests and 50 sets of state ed department folks who have a habit of making those tests progressively easier with each year that goes by. Ethics and abuse of power issues aside, this popular practice just makes it darned hard to know whether kids are learning anything.

I’m assuming, therefore, that one of the mistakes we will not make this time around is allowing states to score their own kids or manage their own data. (Oh, what’s that I’ve heard about state-specific longitudinal data systems? Do we really want 50 of those, too?) I would assume, then, that if we end up with national standards, we’ll end up with national tests – and that the federal government will pick up the tab each year, thus freeing states from what most have deemed an unfunded mandate. This should be very popular. And it will certainly help take some of the politics out of testing and test scores.

But will it really happen? And will it really work? (And by the way, has anyone ever shown that it’s better to build an education system from standards on down than it is to build it from teaching on up? If so, I haven’t read those research studies.)

National tests are subject to the same problems as state tests: (1) Passing scores are set arbitrarily – sometimes too low; sometimes too high – and can be changed at any time without most people noticing; (2) We still don’t have really good ways of measuring educational standards with paper and pencil tests; even Secretary Duncan has acknowledged this (but I guess you go to war with the tests you have, right?); and (3) There’s an extraordinary opportunity here for the federal government to outsource the multi-billion dollar task of testing the entire nation to a single “favored” organization; if I could hazard a guess, I’d say this new “Blackwater of testing” will likely be drawn from one of the hand-picked organizations that is working with Common Core on the standards right now but I hope that some other approach is taken that is more equitable.

In short, national testing will be fraught with the same challenges that state testing is. And if we screw it up, the standards we screw it up with won’t make much of a difference.

So now let’s look at what we might call curriculum or, in fancy terms, curriculum frameworks. As one would expect, the Common Core standards only reveal skills that apply broadly across a given discipline. They don’t convey any information at all about what those standards might look like at different grade levels in terms of students’ actual skills. Something like, “Apply knowledge and concepts gained through reading to build a more coherent understanding of a subject, inform reading of additional texts, and to solve problems.” (Reading #17) is certainly going to look different in kindergarten, 3rd grade, middle school, and high school. But who will be in charge of figuring this out? If the states do it themselves, we’ll be right back to where are now – with 50 different versions of the same educational story. Clearly, that’s not what national standards folks have in mind. Nonetheless, this work will need to be done, and I don’t see who we have lined up to do it.

(I hope it’s not doled out to the same company that gets to do the testing; ever since standards got off the ground, I’ve had this sick feeling that the most significant result of this movement would be the creation of some multi-billion dollar Leviathan who will literally control what our kids learn and how they think. (If Haliburton becomes an EMO, I’m gonna tell all my friends to home school!) On the other hand, if the federal government takes it all in-house, and expands the power and size of the DOE, I’m not sure I feel much better. The problem of nationalized education in a nation such as ours is that it seems somehow anti-American; too little diversity of opinion; too much curtailing of free speech; government control of the means of production; big power in a small number of hands; huge opportunities for the same lapses in ethics and abuses of power that we’ve seen already at the state level.)

What makes the creation of a curriculum framework challenging is that in many cases we don’t know the developmental path that exists for a certain skill from one grade level to the next. While we have pretty good data for reading and writing through the elementary years in this regard, we know very little about mathematics development; for the most part, we’ve all just followed a textbook tradition that has existed – almost totally unexamined – since the 1950s. Frameworks for social studies and science (and even the standards themselves) are impossible to lay out in a grade-by-grade fashion in any way other than by guessing.

This is why I wish we would take some time and actually study what well-educated children know in various subjects and at specific grades (and what great teachers may have taught them). We talk a lot in this country about “research-based” practices and making education more “scientific”. But we tend to skip the science that’s hard and the research that takes a few years to gather. Perhaps the main reason the American education system is so fouled up is because Americans don’t know much about education. Let’s model good behavior for our kids and do our homework on this one.

What I’m arguing for here is nothing more than a real-life road test of Common Core’s standards, valid and reliable tests, and a scientifically researched K-12 framework to go with it. Some companies, like MetaMetrics, for example, have already taken a crack at this. If their work holds up, we might be farther along than we think. But only if we start inviting more players to the party.

Finally, I think we’d all agree that standards are meaningless in light of unreliable tests, arbitrarily constructed frameworks, and poor teaching. In Jim Collins’ famous book, “Good to Great”, he lists a few simple attributes of successful and enduring organizations. I believe his first nugget of wisdom is “Face the brutal facts.” The brutal facts we have to face here in America are these: Common Core will likely produce good standards; our testing will be suspect; our frameworks will not be grounded in good research; our teaching corps will remain woefully under-trained and ineffective; and our children will continue to be poorly educated.

So, bravo to Common Core for creating reading and writing standards that are simple, understandable, and few in number. But I hope, in the years to come, that we apply the same energy and expert scrutiny to the creation of useful tests, scientifically-based frameworks, best practice instruction, and world class teacher training.

 

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I am not a teacher nor a subject area expert. So I am not going to comment on the content. Rather, I'll address two related points: the use of top-down standards and high-stakes testing.

Having standards is pretty common across nations (or their states), but their specificity and intrusiveness varies greatly. Highly-praised Finland (the size of a U.S. state) has national standards described as loose. What really drives Finland’s achievement is high-quality teaching and continuing professional learning and collaboration that turns general standards into strong curriculum and instruction. They are closer to having horizontal standards – things teachers can use to improve their work and that provide some touchstones for larger social levels (locales, states, the nation) to evaluate the state of student learning.

I fear, however, the U.S. will continue to do this backwards, as it has forced states to do under NCLB. By this I mean that, unlike Finland’s approach, the U.S. will use tests to enforce highly detailed, grade-level standards (the next stage of this effort). Meanwhile, only marginal attention is being paid to ensuring that teachers work together to improve. In Duncan's Race to the Top, for example, professional development is still described as something done to, not with, teachers, and is supported far less intensively than is such outright malpractice as paying teachers and principals for boosting test scores.

Ah yes, the tests. The grand theory here is that a new set of national tests (or sets of national tests from various consortia) will be significantly better and therefore spur more learning. The first might even happen, given how poor existing state tests are. But if the goal is high-quality education, it won’t much matter. National tests still foster the dangerous illusion that a one-shot test in a subject can tell everyone from students to teachers to parents to administrators to policymakers to the public how well each and every student and every possible sliced and diced compilation of students are doing. Such tests cannot. With high stakes attached, the tests will perpetuate narrow teaching to the test and curriculum shrinkage, as well as all the cheating and finagling we've seen so much of, from changing scores to driving low scorers out of school. Real learning, as teachers tell us time and again, will not improve.

Maybe, just maybe, instead of a new set of high-stakes standardized exams, some states will decide to use RTTT funds or funds for the new exams to construct an actual assessment system. Such a system would have to build teacher competence, include many types of evidence of student learning and take classroom-based evidence seriously for both instruction and policy decisions. Standardized tests should be used occasionally and with low stakes as checks on the system. (We have a lot of material on these topics on the FairTest website.)

There is growing awareness, even among some defenders of NLCB, that the reliance on one-shot high-stakes mostly multiple-choice tests is a profound error that must be corrected. However, this won't come to pass without a lot of political pressure, because the Duncan administration is proceeding ever further down a dead end path to a "new generation" of test-based illusions and disasters.

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Common state standards—if they are rigorous—could absolutely impact the quality of education in this country.  For too long the US has allowed different expectations for its students based on where they live as well as more insidious factors like race, income gender, primary language, and disability.  Requiring state standards was a step forward, but large, place-based differences in expectations persist.  Only common standards can rectify this.

I am unable to grade the latest draft of common standards produced by the NGA/CCSSO effort, but these organizations have done a great service by producing them.  Hopefully the process will move forward expeditiously.

However, if we stop with common standards, the effect on education quality will be minimal.  We need common assessments of some sort to learn whether students are reaching the standards.  If we persist with the current mix of tests and variety of performance measures of proficiency, expectations will remain based on where students reside.  We also need curriculum frameworks and guides so that teachers have adequate tools to provide engaging learning opportunities for their students to meet standards.

If and when we have common standards, assessments, and curriculum frameworks in the US, all sorts of new dynamics will come into play.  Parents will get an honest picture of what their children need to learn in school and be empowered to demand better from elected officials.  There will be a push among entrepreneurs to develop open source curriculum and varieties of assessments.  The process of elaborating accommodations and modifications for English language learners and students receiving special education and related services will be streamlined and make development efforts more cost effective with a larger market.  The same will be true for all sorts of technology tools for teacher and student use.  The possibilities are endless and are bound to trigger rapid advancement in a sector that still looks a lot like it did 100 years ago.

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There is a real potential upside to the draft standards.  Sensible common standards offer an opportunity to gauge relative performance, identify promising providers and practices, and permit makers of textbooks and learning materials to focus on delivering quality rather than complying with 50 sets of requirements.  Given the conviction that there is an irreducible core of knowledge, skills, and habits of mind that we want all students to master, common standards can make good sense.

There are also substnatial grounds for concern about how these standards are being adopted and how they will be implemented.  Fundamentally, there is a distinction between what all students need to learn, and the multitude of things which we would like some students to learn. The default impulse is to pursue uniformity across the breadth and depth of the curriculum, turning each decision into an all-or-nothing proposition and the curriculum into a battlefield.  If we fail to focus on the distinction between what is essential for all and what is not, standards tend to become rhetorical and unduly expansive, consuming the entire curriculum.

More prosaically, the speed, solitude, and most especially the "let's get it done" groupthink that characterize the current effort raise doubts about how competing curricular visions are being weighed and incorporated.  Similarly, it’s not at all yet clear to me how smart or strategic the thinking is about the assessments, curricula, training, materials that will be determine how the standards actually work. Those efforts will determine whether the standards amount to something of substance, and that tale will play out in a series of grinding, largely invisible technical and political decisions over the next several years-- long after the current euphoria has passed.

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It should be beyond dispute that common standards will impact the quality of education, but only if the standards are meaningful and can translate into reality. That is a big If.

We are a mobile nation. Families move from district to district, state to state. It makes little sense for states to have widely disparate expectations in key academic subjects. But getting from where we are to where we should be will not be easy.

I would give a grade of Incomplete to the recently released standards. I speak now only about the ELA standards; I don't feel qualified to judge the math standards. Both need quite a lot of review by classroom teachers. In the case of ELA, the draft standards have some excellent qualities. I particularly admire their emphasis on the importance of accuracy, a refreshing note! Imagine getting a prescription from your doctor or picking it up from the pharmacist and learning that neither could read or write with accuracy. Your health would be imperilled.

What I am not yet happy with is the lack of specificity in the ELA standards. My hunch is that most if not every ELA teacher would say "I'm already doing that." To improve practice and raise quality, the standards must be more specific in describing what is expected of students as they progress through school. But I am willing to be patient!

Diane Ravitch

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 Organization and Research: Advanced

The draft document is very well organized and provides the reader with an excellent framework. The introductions to both disciplines also provide readers with details important to understanding the logic behind the standards. The research is comprehensive and well documented.

Initiative: Noble

Kudos to the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers for taking the initiative to develop standards. I’d much rather have the NGA and CCSSO in the driver’s seat as opposed to Congress. However, the partnerships with Achieve, ACT and College Board are somewhat troubling since the Work Groups are primarily employees of these organizations. It seems that it would be quite lucrative for the partners to be “in the know” as standards evolve.

Development Groups: Failed

I’m quite dismayed that, once again, practitioners of K-12 have been overlooked. It appears that neither the Work Groups nor the Feedback Groups have members who are practicing K-12 educators. As a matter of fact, these groups are primarily composed of employees from ACT, Achieve, America’s Choice, and the College Board. It is frustrating to think that educators are disregarded in such an important endeavor.

Overall Grade:  Fair

So what does this mean? In Introductions to the Core Standards, it’s made clear that students must be ready for “competition and collaboration”; that “the responsibility for teaching such skills must also extend to the other content areas”; and, that “what is taught is just as important as how it is taught.” There’s nothing new in those beliefs.

The impact of the Core Standards will only be as effective as the classroom teacher. We can have elaborate curriculum content, rigorous goals, and unlimited resources; but if the teacher does not commit to the task of preparing students so that they are college- and career-ready, the development of Core Standards will all be for naught. I can only hope that our colleges and universities will accept the challenge to send us teachers who are on the cutting edge and well versed in pedagogy.   

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