We confess. Mike and I were partly wrong last week: More than half a dozen conservatives have misgivings about the ?Common Core? standards and the tests to follow. The number is up to at least eight and, since conservatives tend to get excited by the sight of red (red meat, red blood, red states, etc.), every time we wave this scarlet flag in front of them we can expect more of them to charge us. Perhaps including the piece you're now reading.
So far, though, we've been nicked but not gored by their horns?and we cheerfully concede that critics have several legitimate concerns. Yes, it would have been better if the voluntary move by states to develop and consider adopting common standards hadn't been entangled in a competition for federal money. Yes, it would be better if more of that same federal money weren't paying for development of new assessment systems to accompany the standards. Yes, it would have been lots better if President Obama had never hinted at harnessing national standards to future Title I funding. Yes, the long-term governance of the standards and tests remains to be worked out.
U.S. education has made only the slimmest achievement gains?none of these at the high-school level?and graduation rates have stayed limp, as more and more countries surpass us on more and more measures on this fast-flattening and ever-more-competitive planet.
But good grief, folks, do you really want to preserve the meager academic expectations, crummy tests, and weak-kneed accountability arrangements that currently drive?or fail to drive?K-12 education across most of this broad land? Are you so risk averse and change resistant as to see no merit in trying to do this differently in the future?
It's true, as multiple bloggers have noted, that I spent part of 1997 itemizing the flaws in Bill Clinton's plan for the federal government to create and administer a national testing system. And like practically everybody else (save for the progressive educators who drafted them), I didn't like much about the federally-induced ?national standards? that had emerged during the Bush I administration earlier that decade.
But many things have changed in thirteen years. Four deserve to be noted.
First, and most important, U.S. education has made only the slimmest achievement gains?none of these at the high-school level?and graduation rates have stayed limp, as more and more countries surpass us on more and more measures on this fast-flattening and ever-more-competitive planet.
Second, despite multiple rounds of asking (and Uncle Sam bribing) states to come up with rigorous academic standards on their own, few have done so. Those few are swell, but most are simply dismal?a ?C? average on the latest Fordham ratings. And they're ridiculously uneven from place to place. Modern countries don't do this to their kids.
Third, much as I wish otherwise, conservatives' preferred alternative education-reform strategies haven't gained the traction or scale that advocates (myself included) hoped for, nor have they delivered reliably better academic results. Yes, the principle has largely been accepted that kids need not necessarily attend the district school in their neighborhood. Yet you can count the voucher programs on your fingers. And charter-school enrollments, while respectably up, don't amount to more than 3 percent of all kids. The parent marketplace isn't causing bad schools to close. (Only Catholic schools, many of them fine, seem to be closing.) One can keep beating this drum?and you'll find more and more people snapping their fingers in time with the beat?but, mostly for political reasons that aren't going away, it hasn't produced a lot of marching.
Fourth, the main sources of resistance to change in American education aren't conservatives (hard as some of the latter are trying!). They're education interest groups, starting but not ending with the teacher unions. They still wield much clout?see previous point?but they're weaker today than at any time in my memory, no doubt because they're beset on more issues on more fronts by more forces. To give credit where it's due, a contributor has been the unexpected emergence of the Obama administration as a source of reform pressure and the schism that's emerged within the Democratic Party over education issues. (This is also the main reason that today there's no serious GOP education platform. Except for vouchers, just about all the traditional ?conservative? education enthusiasms have gone mainstream.)
So yes, I've partly changed my mind about national standards and tests. I'm mindful of the risks and unknowns that lie ahead. I'm not totally satisfied with the Common Core. (Our raters gave it honors grades but not straight As). It troubles me that we're so narrowly focused on just two subjects within the school curriculum. I've no idea what ?cut scores? will be established for the forthcoming tests nor whether colleges and employers will take them seriously. I'm alarmed that one of the new assessment consortia doesn't seem serious about accountability. I'm wary of what Congress will do to the Common Core when it finally gets around to reauthorizing NCLB. I'm nervous about the administration's political backbone as electoral stakes rise. I'm skeptical about the stick-to-it-iveness of states that pledge their troth to Common Core but are rejected at the Race to the Top altar. (This may get clear fast. On Tuesday, a dozen states that had already adopted the new standards?more than one third of all adopters?were omitted from Secretary Duncan's list of RTT finalists.)
But what's the point of just fretting and biting my nails and issuing cries of alarum? The education status quo sucks, to put it bluntly. Conserving it is no fit work for conservatives. In most of the country, they?we?should demand something better.*
That's basically where I was in 1997 when I concluded that Bill Clinton's federally-dominated national testing plan wasn't better. No, I haven't totally changed my mind. I still believe what I wrote then in concluding the Weekly Standard piece that some of my conservative pals have been selectively quoting other portions of:
If national testing is headed that way, the country would be better off without it. Congress should apply the brakes before a wreck occurs. Then maybe?just maybe?let a different driver take a turn at the wheel. If a fully independent version of the [National Assessment Governing] [B]oard I chaired in the 1980s were put in full charge, the risk of crashing would be reduced. Alternatively, the whole idea might be privatized, turned into a commercial (or philanthropic) testing program that picks up Clinton's basic concept but with no government entanglement or federal funds. We still need a means to compare achievement across state borders. But it's worth doing only if the twin tar babies can be avoided. The one thing indisputably worse than no national tests would be bad national tests.
We don't yet know about the tests. But we know about the standards. They're good. They're not perfect, but they're better than what we've been using across most of America. The proper work of conservatives (and others) who care about the nation's future is to help them succeed, not grump about what might go wrong.
*Massachusetts is a different story. Conservatives there were not wrong to press for retention of a set of solid standards and tests that was yielding good results. The Deval Patrick-dominated state-board-of-education decision to start afresh with Common Core was a decision to substitute a system that doesn't yet exist for one that's served the Commonwealth well.
?By Checker Finn
