Originally published in National Journal Education Experts Blog.
The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council and American Principles Project are on the question of the Common Core Standards doing exactly what their brethren on the right indict teacher unions for doing: putting adult interests (the organizations’ philosophical attachment to limited central government) ahead of the interests of students.
There’s ample evidence from the National Assessment of Education Progress, PISA, and other sources that most state standards aren’t demanding enough to ready students for the rigors of college and good jobs in a global knowledge economy.
Criticizing the standards for violating the tenets of federalism is unpersuasive. The standards were created under the auspices of state organizations (the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers) and are voluntary. While the standards establish expectations in reading and math, they don’t tell educators how to reach them. And it’s hard to suggest in a digital era that students in Alabama don’t need the same skills as their counterparts in Alaska. Moreover, when states were given the opportunity to set their own standards under the No Child Left Behind Act, many lowered them.
The common core project is partly an attempt to address that unfortunate consequence of NCLB. It’s also about addressing the larger, endemic inclination of public education to expect less of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and students of color. Unless we have explicit, high standards for all students, public schools will produce, as they did for generations, an education system of haves and have-nots, sorted largely by race and class. Given the changing nature of work and the nation’s rapidly shifting demographics, not to mention how far we’ve come in our commitment to social justice, we don’t want to go back to the future. Instead of questioning the value of rigorous common standards, we should be worried whether the states have the capacity and the compunction to implement the new standards with fidelity.