Originally published in the National Journal.
Before the Clinton-era Improving America’s Schools Act and the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act we relied heavily on thousands of local school systems to set standards of promote excellence and equity on public education. Not surprisingly, they did so with widely varying degrees of commitment and success. In response, the Clinton law required states receiving federal funding to establish statewide standards and tests for their students. NCLB added student performance targets and sanctions for underperforming schools.
And rightly so. Our educational challenges are national, not local. Our pursuit of educational equity is far from fulfilled and workers are increasingly competing for jobs with their counterparts around the world. National problems require national solutions. As commentator Matt Miller wrote in The Atlantic in 2008 of relying on local school boards to meet today’s educational challenges: “It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories.”
With NCLB and rest of the policy infrastructure constructed over the past two decades to promote a national vision of public education in danger of being swept away by a torrent of criticism from the Left and the Right, the Common Core State Standards are rapidly becoming critical components of the campaign to ensure that local educators hold high expectations for all students.
The standards are rigorous, as they should be. Student and teacher performance aligns with our expectations of them; the higher the bar, the more students and teachers achieve. It’s surprising that George Miller and Margaret Spellings would suggest that the Common Core standards are too rigorous. They’re worry that many students will fail the tougher tests is misplaced. It’s true that more students are likely to struggle with the tests, but there’s a workable solution: keep standards high (as the National Assessment of Educational Progress has done) and rate schools on how much their students learn each year, not merely on the basis of whether enough of their students hit a state standard (a strategy that encourages states to lower their achievement bars to reduce failure rates, as many did under NCLB).
But it’s far from clear whether states will implement the Common Core standards with fidelity. A lot will depend on new voluntary national tests now under development. Schools tend to teach what’s tested and while a majority of states have signed up with one or both of the consortia building the new tests and the tests are supposed to be aligned with the standards, there’s no way of knowing at this point whether states will actually administer the tests (which are likely to be more expensive than current standardized tests) or where they’ll set passing scores.
If the tests do end up being more rigorous and states adopt them, the only way to avoid a repeat of the NCLB debacle of vast numbers of schools labeled failures is to rate schools to a significant degree on the basis of students’ annual academic growth. That way schools get credit for educating their students, regardless of where students start on the achievement curve.
As for those who say that the Common Core standards are evidence that we can have a national vision of educational excellence without the participation of the federal government, keep in mind that the standards are the product of two decades of work involving Republican and Democratic administrations dating back to the presidency of George H.W. Bush. The Obama administration gave states a powerful incentive to embrace the Common Core standards, developed under the auspices of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, by making adoption of the standards a prerequisite for receiving federal Race to the Top monies. And the administration is also funding the development of the voluntary national tests that are critical to the Common Core standards’ success.