National Standards Nonesense

11/03/2010 20:33:00 EducationNews.org

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Jay P. Greene

3.12.10 - Jay P. Greene - The national standards train-wreck is pulling into the station, again. This time it is a completely voluntary set of national standards in the same way that complying with a 21-year-old drinking age is completely voluntary for states to receive federal highway money.

National Standards Nonesense
Jay P. Greene's Blog

The national standards train-wreck is pulling into the station, again. This time it is a completely voluntary set of national standards in the same way that complying with a 21-year-old drinking age is completely voluntary for states to receive federal highway money. States had to commit to a rushed and largely secretive national standard setting process as part of the Race to the Top application.

Well, now the draft standards have been released for a hurried public comment period before they try to cram them into place. In the end they’ll probably fail to get all the states on board for anything meaningful, but it won’t be for lack of arm-twisting. The Gates Foundation has sprinkled money on just about every education policy organization to ensure their support or at least muted opposition.

Even people and groups that should have no interest in these national standards and even expressed skepticism of them in the recent past are now embracing them. Barely two weeks ago Checker Finn wrote:

This is enormously risky and, frankly, hubristic, since nobody yet has any idea whether these standards will be solid, whether the tests supposed to be aligned with them will be up to the challenge, or whether the “passing scores” on those tests will be high or low, much less how this entire apparatus will be sustained over the long haul.

But today he is quoted in the New York Times expressing his enthusiastic support:

I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education… Now we have the possibility that, for the first time, states could come together around new standards and high school graduation requirements that are ambitious and coherent. This is a big deal.

What gives? Nothing in the draft standards should have put Checker at ease about their rigor. And nothing has happened that has addressed his earlier concerns about aligning tests, setting high cut scores, or sustaining rigor over time.

Similarly the folks over at Core Knowledge have decided to drink the Kool-Aid. Just a few months ago I expressed frustration with national standards advocates:

Every decade or so we have to debate the desirability of adopting national standards for education. People tend to be in favor of them when they imagine that they are the ones writing the standards. But when everyone gets into the sausage-making that characterizes policy formulation, it generally becomes clear that no one is going to get what they want out of national standards. What’s worse is that the resulting mess would be imposed on everyone. There’d be no more laboratory of the states, just uniform banality. Of course, some people always hope that they’ll somehow manage to sneak their preferred vision into place without having to go through the meat grinder.

At the time Core Knowledge’s Robert Pondiscio linked to that post and added “I’m inclined to agree.” But today he is the press contact for a statement from Core Knowledge declaring that the new draft national standards are a “not-to be-missed opportunity for American education.”

What’s even more amazing is that the draft national standards are being guided by the same 21st Century Skills nonsense articulated by Tony Wagner. Core Knowledge supporters should recoil in horror at this approach unless they fantasize that they will “somehow manage to sneak their preferred vision into place” without the edublob noticing and blocking them. Good luck.

I’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well. The standards will inevitably be diluted and made even more 21st century skill-like to gain sufficiently broad support. The standards-based reformers at Fordham and Core Knowledge will end up renouncing the final product, but will continue to believe that if only the right standards were adopted all would be well. And we’ll start this all over again in about a decade.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 10:55 pm

8 Responses to “National Standards Nonsense”

rse Says:

March 11, 2010 at 3:02 am | Reply
Could this change in attitude have anything to do with the ability of nonprofits to participate in the huge Investing in Innovation Fund? There are buzzwords in the drafts that make it quite clear that it was improved to be solid enough to avoid the worst of the criticisms while allowing project based learning to be the vehicle for all that math “understanding” and recognitions of other points of views and cultures.
Classic Bait and Switch-national process and thinking skills standards under the cover of just enough content rhetoric to get political support.
Checker Says:
March 11, 2010 at 9:05 am | Reply
Jay, try reading the draft standards yourself rather than listening to the grumps and crotchets that surround you. No, they’re not perfect (and some people now fill their days and earn their livings taking shots at them) but they’re pretty darned good, better than those of the overwhelming majority of states. States that don’t find them superior ought not adopt them. And maybe they’ll be better after repairs are made at the end of the current comment period. But no, I haven’t lost my mind. What I did instead was read the standards themselves rather than just reading peoples’ opinions about them.
PS: Fordham’s experts’ detailed reviews will be out next week.
- Ze'ev Says:
- March 11, 2010 at 12:33 pm | Reply
- Checker, I cannot speak to the grumps (or cheerleaders) surrounding either you or Jay, but I did read the math standards. Similar to your taking a pass on the math, I’ll take a pass on the ELA standards. Regarding the math though, I disagree with you. In addition to numerous weaknesses described elsewhere, I will just say that the whole K-8 program presents a fundamentally distorted view of elementary mathematics with almost an exclusive focus on drilling (yes!) of the “understanding” of numbers and operations, but with little attention to practice or developing arithmetical fluency. Its strangely abstract focus reminds me sometimes of the 1960s New Math. And the fundamental misalignment between their concept of “college readiness”, and the actual college admission requirements, is still present there. Why, I can’t say. Perhaps NCEE’s machination; perhaps Gates Foundation’s; or both.
Jay P. Greene Says:
March 11, 2010 at 12:27 pm | Reply
Checker, let’s leave aside for now the quality of the draft standards. Even if the standards are acceptable, the issue as you noted two weeks ago is “whether the tests supposed to be aligned with them will be up to the challenge, or whether the ‘passing scores’ on those tests will be high or low, [and] how this entire apparatus will be sustained over the long haul.” Nothing has happened in the last two weeks that reassure you on any of those issues. My biggest concern is how this plays out over time. Once you build a national standards machine, what makes you think that you will remain at the controls over time even if you are driving when the process starts? I can’t even understand your confidence that maybe the standards will get better over this three week comment period, let alone over the next three decades.
The political reality is that the edublob and its taste for low and silly standards are much more likely to prevail than the good things that you or Don Hirsch may want.
A more fundamental reality is that we have too big, too decentralized, and too diverse of a country to impose a single set of quality standards on everyone. To form a majority coalition those standards will inevitably be watered-down and distorted, if anything can be adopted at all.
Nor is it persuasive to suggest that states shouldn’t adopt these standards if they aren’t really better. If it really were so voluntary, then the same forces preventing them from better standards now will prevent them from adopting quality national standards even if they are offered. The non-participants in a truly voluntary scenario (assuming good national standards) should be the bad states, not the good ones.
But as we both know, this national standards push is not really voluntary. The feds already condition funds on states accepting the standards. And there is talk of expanding those conditions to include Title I or more. Everyone understands that more federal coercion is likely if these standards get off the ground.

I’m not opposed to quality standards and my taste in standards largely coincides with yours. But the only way we’ll get those kinds of standards is if we allow standards to be set at the school, local, or state level with competition rewarding or sanctioning those who choose good or bad standards.
I also suspect that I am more pluralistic about standards than you are. There are likely many different quality sets of standards that schools could adopt, and we will obliterate that diversity, choice, and competition if we impose too much from the center.

I understand your attraction to having a set of quality national standards, but I think you are making political miscalculations about how all of this will turn out.
Patrick Says:
March 11, 2010 at 12:37 pm | Reply
I would disagree with any national standard no matter how good they were. There is simply no evidence to suggest national standards improve education – especially if it is the same broken system of education. We should go the opposite direction and decentralize schooling, not centralize it even more. We need a free market in education, not a Soviet-style command economy.
Andrew Coulson Says:
March 11, 2010 at 3:04 pm | Reply
Jay makes a good point about the staff car politics of national education standards. Standards advocates seem to imagine they’ll always be the ones in power, riding around in the flag adorned staff cars and making the decisions about what the standards will contain. In reality, “The other guys,” whoever they happen to be, will invariably come to power at some point and send things in quite a different direction. I’d add one other point: the whole idea that 50 million kids should progress through all their studies in every subject at a single pace based on their age, is foolish, cruel, and pedagogical malpractice. Yet that is the assumption underlying any system of national standards tied to our existing age-based grade system. (More on that point in an op-ed tomorrow at Pajamas Media).
Neal McCluskey Says:
March 11, 2010 at 3:26 pm | Reply
Fancy meeting you here, Andrew! Anyway, Patrick, you are exactly right, and it troubles me to no end that the evidence on national standards never seems to even enter into the debate. Moreover, Checker’s outfit just reviewed my new report (linked to through my name) on the national standards evidence and somehow made it sound like no research has been done on national standards. The reality, of course, is that research has been done albeit it pretty sparse and it shows no convincing positive effect, which is the main point of my paper.
If we are going to attach billions of federal dollars to national standards in an effort to impose them on every state, we ought to at least discuss the research on them! Don’t we owe the taxpayers that much?