As many parents who have moved from one state to another can tell you, there can be substantial differences in content and rigor of schools from one place to another. In 2010, Andrew Rotherham wrote, “states, school districts, and in some cases individual schools are allowed to set both their academic standards and the tests to determine whether students are reaching them.” The American Institutes for Research conducted a study in 2009, which concluded, “What students are expected to know in one state may be up to four grade levels behind the expectations set in another state.”
Some states and districts set high standards that reflect what students should know and be able to do to succeed in college and work. Others set low standards that are easy to meet so that parents and the public get a rosier picture of student achievement than is actually the case. One of the major causes of this inconsistency. is that for a long time education has typically fallen under state purview, and in some states, control lies at the district level. With so many chiefs at the chalkboard, the result has been a widely disparate level of school quality.
But, over the last few years this has all started to change. The potpourri of standards and expectations is moving toward becoming more uniform as states begin to adopt a common set of internationally benchmarked standards called the Common Core. These new standards will help ensure that all students have access to a quality education, regardless of zip code. They will also make our nation, as whole, with other higher-achieving countries.
The movement toward a common set of standards began in the 1980s when, in 1989, President George H.W. Bush laid out his “National Education Goals for the year 2000.” President Clinton picked up the mantle at the beginning of his term in 1993, and succeeded in provided seed-money for states to develop standards and create assessments aligned to them.. While these new systems were generally an improvement over what preceded them, they still, as noted above, resulted in state-by-state discrepancies in educational rigor.
Starting in 2009, The National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers began an effort to take standards to the next level, setting out to create standards that would set a high bar for all states. The standards were were released in 2010. Now, all but five US states (Alaska, Texas, Minnesota, Nebraska and Virginia) and Puerto Rico have adopted the Common Core.
So, what exactly does this mean for education systems across the country? The adoption of Common Core will not mean that every school in the country looks exactly the same. What it will mean is that we will have better data to improve the rigor of schools across the country. As Rotherham puts it: “Assuming quality and comparability are maintained, the new standards offer a common denominator in public education to help think about student performance and productivity…it’s hard to overstate the importance of this to the national effort to improve schools across 50 states and thousands of communities.”
Further, the standards will help the US to be more internationally competitive. As Marc Tucker, an early proponent of national standards argues: “Without broad agreement on a well designed and internationally benchmarked system of standards, we have no hope of producing a nation of students who have the kind of skills, knowledge and creative capacities the nation so desperately needs. There is no substitute for spelling out what we think students everywhere should know and be able to do. Spelling it out is no guarantee that it will happen, but failing to spell it out is a guarantee that we will not get a nation of young people capable of meeting the challenges ahead.”
While the Common Core may not be perfect, society is changing and it is inevitable that educational standards must change with it if we are to maintain global competitiveness. In other words, the Prius has left the station.