The movement to adopt national education standards is hurtling down the tracks to acceptance, even as many of the decision-makers behind it are laying eyes on the draft for the first time. While "voluntary" is the word that proponents routinely use to describe the proposed standards, that label is seriously misleading.
The idea is that states are coming together of their own volition to support the drafting of these guidelines for teaching reading and math, and they will be free to accept or reject the final product.
The effort will be truly voluntary only if governors and state legislatures are willing to reject hundreds of millions of federal dollars being tied to accepting the standards. How many political leaders have the guts to do that?
On July 29, the Obama administration announced that states seeking to receive shares of the $4.35 billion Congress allocated to states for education reform must adopt the new standards as their own, along with the national standardized tests to which they are aligned. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he will pay for the tests with another $350 million of federal taxpayer money. So there is little surprise that 47 states have already agreed to sign on, most of them before a draft of the standards had even been released.
Other signs the fix is in: Work groups of largely little-known academics assembled by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association have just completed a first draft of the Common Core State Standards, and a veritable who's who of powerful education interests, including the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, has already endorsed not only the standards but "aligned curriculums and aligned assessments."
Supporters of the standards argue that when everyone is taking the same test of the same curricular standards, it will be easier to ensure that all kids really do keep up.
But will really children learn more if and when there is a single national curriculum and tests subject to the influence of Washington interest groups and the shifting whims of politicians and federal bureaucrats?
An analysis of the first draft suggests a state like Maryland, which has invested much time and money into developing and refining its own standards during the past decade, might take several steps backward by discarding its work in exchange for the one-size-fits-all national model.
