By B. Jason Brooks

While praising the release this week of draft national education standards by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Operators, the New York Daily News (here) and other news outlets should have at least offered the caution deserved and the caveats necessary to put this effort, and its potential results, into proper perspective.

The effort of 48 states (Alaska and Texas are not participating) and the District of Columbia to set common, high-quality learning standards is indeed praiseworthy on many fronts: it seems just and fair to say as a nation that we hold a student in Arkansas to the same educational expectations as a student in Maine, for example.  Being able to evaluate each state’s progress toward these common learning standards using a common measuring stick would be nice, too.

This first public release of the proposed voluntary national learning standards raises many questions that need to be fully addressed, however, before we rally every school child, parent, and teacher in America around them.

First, the jury is still out on how rigorous the proposed standards are and if the strength of these standards will be increased or watered-down after the public comment period.  Claims by some that the national standards will set “a bar higher than even the highest standard currently set by any single state” simply aren’t true; while education officials in Minnesota commended (here) the standards in English language arts, they noted that the draft math standards would represent a step backwards for that state, for example.

A recent New York Times story (here) notes that implementation of national standards could face resistance from states that already have high-quality standards and assessments.  Massachusetts, for example, is widely regarded as having world-class learning standards and assessments, and that state’s consistent top-ranking performance on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests lead to justified questions about what lesser national standards would offer there.  Additionally, previous drafts of the voluntary national English language arts and math standards have fallen well short of the top state standards in these subjects once all stakeholders weighed-in.  This latest effort could suffer a similar fate without sufficient vigilance and dedication, both commodities too often lacking when the policy reforms meet the political world.

The push for national standards must accommodate the desire by states to implement even better learning standards, as Minnesota, Massachusetts, and several others already have.  This important issue unfortunately seems to have been side-stepped.

Second, the virtuous new way of thinking about education created by the No Child Left Behind reforms – specify what children need to know and then measure if they have learned it – is not guaranteed, at least not yet, by this week’s announcements on national learning standards.  Even if the standards are acceptably high, a similar collaborative and cooperative effort will need to occur to develop assessments aligned to these standards and set thresholds for passing scores that ensure students will be held to high expectations.  It remains to be seen if governors and state education commissioners will have the courage to follow through and implement rigorous assessments.  The well-regarded NAEP exams – commonly referred to as the “gold standard” in assessments – reveal that a whopping 68 percent of the nation’s 8th graders score below proficient in math and 70 percent fail in writing.  Will similarly embarrassing failure rates – the hard truth, actually – be allowed by states’ political leaders, or will they work to soften the exams or the passing thresholds to achieve the desired appearance?  This tricky work, the heated discussions, and the difficult decisions are a ways down the road yet, though they will play a significant and fundamental role in the overall success or failure of the national standards effort.

Third, the proposed standards covered only English language arts and math (encouragingly, the proposed English language arts standards included literacy skills needed to understand scientific and math-based concepts and activities).  By avoiding the development of standards for science and social studies, the common-standards movement may have avoided being derailed by so-called “culture wars.”  Standards-development efforts in the past showed that deciding on when to begin teaching algebra is less controversial than whether to teach about multiculturalism and evolution or creationism.  As such, states are likely to maintain their own standards in science and social studies for a long time, regardless of whether these standards are any good.  Where the new standards would increase a state’s expectations in math or English language arts, progress will have been made.  But folks need to understand that this isn’t the complete fix-it solution.

While the national standards reform movement currently shows promise, a great deal of work and political courage will be necessary in order for it to create the rising tide that will lift all boats.  The standards need to not only be on par with the best state standards currently in use, but would do well to represent world-class expectations.  Common assessments, to be used on all students nationwide, need to be developed that comprehensively measure student learning of these standards.  And states will need to have the courage to accept rigorous cut scores despite the potential of widespread failure rates.  If these all fall in place, then we can celebrate. For now, there is much more work to be done.

B. Jason Brooks is director of research at the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability and can be followed on twitter at http://twitter.com/bjbrooksNY.