He's not exactly the prodigal son , for he hasn't returned, and, well, he's not my son. But he's lost, gone "rogue" as one colleague put it, off the reservation.
Former Fordham staffer and Flypaper contributor Liam Julian has a piece in the Weekly Standard that attacks national standards . Oh Liam, where did we go wrong?
To be fair, it's a good piece, complete with a rendering of the history of the failed attempts to draft national standards back in the early 90s, and a catalogue of concerns about the current Common Core State Standards Initiative . But then he argues thusly:
Several states have actually managed to craft admirable standards, among them California, Indiana, and Massachusetts; and several others are revising standards that badly need it. Will these states be compelled to jettison the results of their fine work and remake their curricula and assessments to jibe with "voluntary" national standards? A wiser course would be to publicize and praise states with top-notch standards and rigorous tests, while also publicizing and impugning those states content to slouch along with subpar standards and assessments.
And will such publicizing and impugning lead to a critical mass of strong state standards before the dawn of the next millennium? Unlikely. At least that's what Liam (and Checker and I) argued three years ago :
Is There Hope for State Standards?
Robust state standards trump faulty ones when it comes to setting a good foundation for systemic education reform. And yet, over the past six years, state standards on the whole remain problematic. It's not because the states have not been idle in this domain.?? As noted above, almost four-fifths of them have updated at least one subject's standards, in most cases without producing stronger documents. Waiting another six years for the states to get it right seems unlikely to change the outcome.
But what's the alternative? Even acknowledging its flaws, standards-based reform is still the most promising driver of educational improvement today. Just look at Massachusetts, the state that has most faithfully implemented this approach in the past decade--and one with some of the best standards in the country. Its NAEP scores have risen dramatically in practically every category, including for poor and minority students. Achievement gaps and big challenges remain, but most states would be thrilled to see the kind of progress the Bay State has enjoyed.
So we're left with a dilemma: the few jurisdictions that implement standards-based reform will see great results. Yet most states muck it up--and the situation hasn't improved in at least six years. Pushing and prodding states to get their act together hasn't worked. (Maybe Joanne Jacobs' essay will inspire a few jurisdictions.) So what else? The only way to fundamentally solve this problem, as we see it, is to build on the success of states like Massachusetts and move to a system of national standards and tests.
We understand that national standards would face the same perils as state standards. If written by committee, or turned over to K-12 interest groups, they could turn out to be vague, politically correct, encyclopedic, and/or fuzzy. If linked with real consequences for schools, they could be pressured downward. They could even wind up doing more harm than good.
But if done right, they could finally put the entire country on the sturdy path of standards-based reform. And if great standards can be written in Sacramento or Indianapolis or Boston, perhaps they could be created in Washington, D.C.
Some people say that national standards and tests will never happen, that they will prove (yet again) to be politically impossible. Perhaps. But we've grown just as skeptical about the chances of state standards getting any better. So we'll hedge our bets: we'll push for better state standards even as we fight for great national standards. For the sake of the country, we hope that one of those strategies will finally come to fruition.
Those of us at Fordham are still fighting. Liam, will you join us?
