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NY Times decades behind on standards

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The editorial on the national standards in today’s New York Times is uninformed as to beggar belief. “National School Standards, At Last” argues that: The countries that have left the United States behind in math and science education have one thing in common: They offer the same high education standards — often the same curriculum — from one end of the nation to the other. The problem with the proposed national standards is not that they would be uniform, though there are good reasons to fear what they would mean for states like Massachusetts, which have used federalism to push ever higher. The principal problem is that the proposed standards are not high at all. The Times goes on to […]

MetroWest Daily: Not these national standards

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The MetroWest Daily today also published a different op-ed piece by Ze’ev Wurman and Sandy Stotsky on the national standards. The piece makes the point that the standards effort started out as a voluntary for states. But President Obama just announced that signing on to once voluntary standards would be a condition for receipt of federal funding, even though the standards aren’t even complete and recent drafts are woefully deficient. In short, the “Common Core College Readiness” standards wouldn’t get you into college. Our review of a recent draft finds that they fail to meet the requirements of almost all the nation’s state colleges and universities. The standards are not benchmarked against those in high-achieving countries. As a result, requirements […]

Worcester T&G: Keep nat'l standards voluntary

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Today’s Worcester Telegram & Gazette editorial underscores that adoption of the national standards needs to remain voluntary. The core of the argument is that the federal government should not have “legal power” over the standards. Washington is pressing to command a greater role in dictating what American children should learn, and how they should be taught. The result could be a useful adjunct to local and state instruction, or a costly blunder into a thicket of bureaucracy that does real harm to taxpayers and students. A common set of education standards that draws upon the collective wisdom of educators could present underachieving states and school districts with successful models to emulate, such as those in Massachusetts. But such standards must […]

Wurman & Stotsky skewer the proposed national standards

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In the past days, the announcements by Minnesota and Virginia that they are most likely not going to adopt the common core standards drove giant holes right through the wall of consensus that the CCSSO and NGA have tried to maintain. Ze’ev Wurman, a high-tech executive in Silicon Valley active in developing California’s standards and assessments in the mid-1990s, and Sandy Stotsky, one of the nation’s top experts on academic standards, authored our research, Race to the Middle?, chronicling the numerous weaknesses in previous drafts of the common core standards drafts, as well as the soft conceptual underpinning for the whole effort. In today’s Boston Globe, they come out swinging on the public comment drafts. This is a must read, […]

Our Stand on Standards

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Seems our report and the release of the common core standards draft have set off a lot of interest in Massachusetts’ view, and especially in Pioneer’s take on the national standards effort. See Jay Greene’s blog for a long string of comments. Here is a bit of a longish overview of some of the issues we see in this from the Massachusetts and the national perspective. First, the Mass perspective: 1. Standards are the lifeblood of student achievement in public schools; and that includes even those site-based managed schools that are based on parental choice. You all know the stories of charters and voucher programs that don’t deliver the kind of transformational improvement we all want. In MA, our charters […]