"National" Standards--Part III

Okay, now it seems that we MAY get a "national" assessment to go along with our "national" standards.  According to this article in Education Week, it appears that the Department of Education has "set aside" up to $350 million dollars that is apparently earmarked to assist the states in developing "common assessments" (though talk is indeed cheap in this context).  No information yet as to how these "common assessments" will be developed, but the process for developing the standards themselves might shed some light.

Under the process as currently conceived, the National Governors Association and the Council for Chief State School Officers are jointly coordinating the effort, but they have named several other parties to do the initial drafting, including the College Board, Achieve, Inc., and ACT, two of which are actually testing companies, as mentioned in my prior post.  Once the initial drafting is done, the standards will be critiqued by a panel of designated experts, including representatives from academia, state school leadership, and the national professional organizations for both math (NCTM) and language arts (NCTE).  There is also a new website allowing one to follow the process. 

That's the good news.  The bad news (if you are into centralization of education policy) is that four states have already stated that they will not adopt the standards (see here--subscription required).  This is before any content of the standards is known.  Once the content of the standards comes out, it seems likely to me that several other states will have problems with one or more portions of the standards, either due to over- or under-inclusiveness.  You know the old joke that a camel is a horse built by committee?  Standards are never promulgated in any other way.  It is the states' prerogative whether or not to adopt the standards, and nothing except a "memorandum of understanding" prevents any state from opting out after seeing the standards. 

It seems that the same will be true for any "common assessment" developed in this manner.  Do we really think that states performing poorly on any common assessment will not find a way to get out of it?  Which brings me back to my original point, which is that a set of standards that is not binding through a requirement in positive law that states abide by them, or through pegging state supplementary funding to results on a common assessment, is merely a set of suggestions, not standards. 

If we are really serious about this, isn't it time to start thinking about getting Congress involved?  That is, if it is a good idea to have common national standards and a common national test, it seems that federal law is the best way to accomplish it.  No person who supports "national" standards could possibly object on "local control" grounds to federal standards.  The process could even occur in much the same way (with the NGA and the CCSSA, as federal designees, spearheading and the already named experts developing and critiquing the standards). 

However, the end result, once passed into law, would not be a set of suggestions, but a set of actual standards--the binding kind.  The kind we actually have to meet.  These would be federal standards, AND national standards.  If backed up by a rigorous federal test (mandatory NAEP anyone?), we could then make meaningful comparisons of state outcomes, and we might even save the states a lot of money that would otherwise go to test development.  To me, this would be a vast improvement over the extremely expensive (and yet underfunded), confusing, and frustrating half-measures of NCLB.