National vs. state standards for education and why it matters
A look at the debate over the new common core standards
The N.Y. Times reports that many states have quickly adopted national education standards. While this is surely due in part to the money awarded to those states that adopt the standards by August 2nd as part of the Race to the Top competition, the question of whether the U.S. should adopt national standards for education has been and continues to be a fundamental and divisive issue independent of any excitement caused by the new funding.
Supporters of national standards for education traditionally cite great variation in the levels of competency between different states under state-regulated standards. Pushing for national standards, they argue, will ensure that children in all states receive uniform education, instead of the wide discrepancies in knowledge base and competency symptomatic of state-regulated education. Local control of education is seen as a formula for mediocrity. One education scholar adds that “a child deemed a ‘proficient’ reader by officials in Texas is reading at the below basic level in Massachusetts.” National standards threaten to expose this kind of discrepancy.
Supporters of state standards take several different positions. One argument is that the new national standards are too weak– as one expert puts it, “ they may lead to more uniformly mediocre student achievement.” The concern here is that some states, particularly the leaders like Massachusetts, already have far more rigorous standards for education. Adopting these standards, which are seen as far less rigorous, could lead to both a mentality of satisfied mediocrity and eventually substantive losses for the United States in a global economy based increasingly on progress in science and math.
There is also an interesting argument against national standards that moves in a slightly different direction. National standards are destructive to the possibility of high achievement, this one goes, because federally mandated standards are synonymous with a lack of accountability. The newly adopted standards (read: Washington) can be blamed for poor performance in local education. Local officials are enabled to surrender responsibility.
These arguments all have merit. There is good reason to endorse either position. And it is not a matter of debate whether schools should be held accountable for their performance or that the U.S. should not tolerate widespread mediocrity.
What, then, are we arguing about? There is something else at stake in this discussion. It could be the sense that education is much more than a checklist of what pupils should have learned when they enter some grade level. It could be the feeling that education is even more, perhaps, than a solid knowledge base and powerful written and oral expression.
What is all the fuss about? In part, it’s about the attempt to homogenize and reduce an incredibly complex system that demands holistic thinking. This conversation between arguments for and against national standards is only a springboard for a larger issue about the nature of education itself.
But the frustrating and often barren debate does do something important. It avoids discussing the possibility that education standards themselves can never be reliable guarantees of aptitude. It rejects the fear that a good education consists of something else entirely than properly constructed sentences and basic equations, and that the results garnered from attempting to enforce any kind of standard are only useful in debate.
-Ethan
Image used under a Creative Commons attribution license from Flickr user richardmasoner
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2 Responses to “National vs. state standards for education and why it matters”
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It seems to me that trading local control of education for federal standards is really neutral on the issue of great education. I agree that a good education cannot be reduced to a certain federally mandated checklist any more than it could be reduced to a certain local standard. However, in the education system that many Americans are experiencing, any increased accountability is worthwhile. Truly bad teaching can be easily discovered by such standards. While I understand that mediocre teaching that caters to the federal standards will be difficult to differentiate from inspired teaching, I do believe that the new standards will help expose the abysmal teaching that has been allowed to go on in far too many of our nation’s schools. In my opinion, improving our students’ education from bad to mediocre is far more important than any possible loss in the most elite local education establishments.
Speaking on a purely individualistic level, I think it’s a great idea to nationalize standards. In our increasingly mobile society, kids move around and go to schools in different states. With different state standards, most end up like me, using the same text book for middle school and high school biology, never taking a class in American history, but knowing four different states’ histories, and being faced with the prospect of not being able to graduate high school on time because one state counts photography as a fine art and another doesn’t. Certainly there is an education crisis in America, and perhaps the elevated importance of “standards” plays a significant role in this. However, I think that as society becomes less rooted in a particular hometown, or state, it is undeniable that these (to me) arbitrary state standards harm a child’s education by generating an unbalanced curriculum for the migratory student and establishing the classic red tape of bureaucracies with things like graduation requirements, failures that could be avoided if standards were homogenized.