There’s a debate brewing about how much--if at all--great standards contribute to education reform. This week, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial saying that they are not as important to student achievement as universal choice. And recently, Cato’s Neal McCluskey published a report (and yesterday a blog post) arguing, essentially, that standards don’t really drive achievement and thus that the move to draft rigorous common standards is distracting us from pushing reforms that might actually drive student achievement. Namely, universal choice…But, to say that advocating for more rigorous standards is a distraction from reforms that will drive student achievement seems so far removed from everything I’ve ever experienced in education…Read it here.
