We just concluded our daylong conference??on "International Lessons about National Standards," centered around Bill Schmidt's excellent policy brief??of the same name. An informal show of hands at the end of the session showed a sizable majority of the 200 attendees believing that, within five years, there will be a new national test and lots of states will adopt it as their own. Put differently, they think the NGA/CCSSO-led effort to create a "Common Core" of state standards??will succeed.
Let's hope so. There are innumerable reasons that national standards and tests would be better for the country than the fifty state patchwork we have today (greater comparability of schools across state lines, the opportunity to aim much higher than most states do, the potential that it could create a national marketplace for instructional materials, professional development, and teacher preparation, and on and on).
And we learned today that the leaders of the common standards initiative are interested in getting to common tests too--and to use these standards and tests to drive instructional change at the classroom level. This is a big deal, and could even be (I hate this term) a game-changer.
But pitfalls remain, and plenty of smart folks think these will snare this go-around as they did previous ones. Most notably: what's the process for making decisions about what the common standards will entail? With the NGA and CCSSO leading an ad-hoc group of "partners" (including Achieve, ACT, and the College Board), it remains unclear who, at the end of the day, will make judgments about the scope of the standards themselves.
If these folks think that they will find a way to avoid the math wars and the reading wars, or the content vs. 21st Century Skills debate, they are kidding themselves. I think they understand that, but I also fear that they don't yet have a process in place that will successfully adjudicate these pressures and come out with a solid product.
But for now, let us celebrate another important milestone toward the worthy objective of challenging all of America's students with the same high expectations. Hear hear.
