My first thought when I read the news in the Washington Post today  was:  THIS IS HUGE!!!! I can’t say that I’m surprised, or that I didn’t see it coming, but I never thought it would happen so soon!

Three months ago, I did a little digging into the subject of national education standards. As per the resulting post, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and AFT President Randi Weingarten had on separate occasions mentioned national standards as being on the educational horizon, and David Hoff announced on his Education Week blog that governors at the National Governors Association (NGA) winter meeting approved a statement calling for a national effort to define common standards of what all American students should know.

As to what these national standards might look like, Hoff noted that the NGA, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve Inc. had invited education and policy leaders to form an International Benchmarking Advisory Group to research internationally benchmarked standards. The idea seemed to be that if we pinpoint the standards that students in the highest achieving countries are held to, and we gear American public education to those same standards, then our students will have the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in today’s global market. (Incidentally, an article in last week’s New York Times reported that more than a million college freshmen across the country are forced to take remedial courses each year upon entering college. At least in theory, implementing internationally benchmarked national academic standards in high school would also better prepare students for college and reduce the need for such remedial education.)

But I digress. Here’s today’s Washington Post update: Forty-six states and the District of Columbia agreed to participate in an effort led by the NGA and the Council of Chief State School Officers to define a single set of internationally competitive national standards that will outline what children should learn each year from kindergarten through 12th grade. (Texas, Alaska, Missouri and South Carolina didn’t sign on.)

By July, a secret team of experts who are working on the project will present the reading and math standards that kids in high school should master by the time they graduate. They will then lay out the standards that children need to reach each year (K-12) to achieve that final goal. Once the proposal is complete, states will nominate experts to a national validation panel that will review the proposal. Finally, each state will then get to decide whether to adopt the proposal or not.

Wow! Where do I begin? How about with the impact this will have on our education system. In every state that adopts this proposal, curriculum, instruction, and assessments will have to be revised and realigned to point teachers and students in the same direction. According to Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, the new standards will be “higher, clearer and fewer,” giving districts and schools the flexibility to decide specifically what to teach and how in order to achieve them. Good news from a theoretical standpoint since I’m sure a consensus would never be reached among multiple states if the standards were too specific, but practically speaking, where are the resources going to come from to help all teachers in all schools get on the right track and stay there?

And what about the achievement gap? If it exists currently, with standards being different in every state, will uniform standards do anything to help us narrow the gap? In other words, if so many kids currently aren’t hitting the bar, and we raise it, are we prepared to help them aim even higher? I’m all for setting higher and more uniform goals and expectations, and agree that it isn’t fair, under the current system, for students in some states to excel in high school only to get to college and find out how ill-prepared they actually are.  But I’m even more interested in how we are going to get our kids to attain these higher goals.

Granted, as Wilhoit suggests in the article, having the same national standards means companies that create textbooks and professional development programs could focus all their resources on developing and perfecting the best possible products to be used across the country. This will definitely help, but it just doesn’t seem like it will be nearly enough.

And of course, the question of assessment looms large. New standards will require new ways to gauge how well students measure up. And while I wish I could assume that performance-based assessments and demonstrations of mastery (e.g. portfolio based assessments and exhibitions—see previous post here) will be adopted nationwide, my guess is that revised standardized tests will be the assessment method of choice.  So what then will we do with students/schools who don’t meet the standards?

But I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself. First, we need to come up with world-class standards that all (or at least most) states can agree with. (A tall order in and of itself). Then we need to figure out how to align curriculum, instruction and assessments with these standards in ways that will enable teachers to guide students to mastery (hopefully with no drill and kill test prep!) Not going to be easy. As Arne Duncan says:

This is the beginning of a new day for education in our country…A lot of hard work is ahead of us. But this is a huge step in a direction that would have been unimaginable just a year or two ago.

(Photo: Marxchivist’s flickr photostream/Creative Commons)