Should children in Alabama learn a different kind of math from children in New York?
The education summit held last month gave a big boost to the idea that we need to raise standards of student achievement. Business leaders and governors talked about what is expected of youngsters in other countries and agreed that it is unacceptable for U.S. students to lag behind. But there was a gap in the discussions.
With all the talk about raising standards, the subject of national standards -- a set of common expectations for all our students -- hardly came up. This is no surprise. In the recent congressional elections, conservative groups made clear their hostility toward programs with the label national or ( even worse) federal, so governors might have feared the political consequences of aligning themselves with national standards. Nevertheless, there are a number of reasons why working toward a set of national (not federal) standards makes much better sense than settling for 50 (or 15,000) state or local ones. Diane Ravitch lays out some of the arguments in "50 Ways to Teach Them Grammar" (Washington Post, April 11, 1996).
First, as Ravitch notes, the idea that we can't have national standards and curriculums because every state, and indeed locality wants to create its own is bunk. We already have a national curriculum -- but it is set by textbook publishers, and its standards are very low. That is one of the reasons why student achievement is also very low.
And even if states and localities now want to create their own standards and curriculums, how can we justify 50 (or 15,000) different ones? We are one nation. Is an understanding of the Constitution or the way to write a decent paragraph more important for students in some communities than in others? Should children in Alabama learn a different kind of math or science from children in New York? One reason why students in other industrialized nations excel is because they do not have to put up with fragmented curriculums. As Ravitch points out. Mathematics and science work according to the same principles regardless of the city, state or nation. The airplane that just flew over my house doesn't care what country it is in; it works the same way in Austria, Nigeria, and Japan as it does in the United States. Students in my neighborhood need to know exactly the same mathematics and science that are taught in the best schools in other cities, states, and nations.
This does not mean that national standards must lead to a single and invariable curriculum -- the kind that tells you that if it's March 12, seventh graders must be studying the Dred Scott Decision. It would be a great mistake to ignore regional and local history and literature and culture, and there is no need to do that. In fact, we'd probably want to devote only 50 to 70 percent of the time to items in the national curriculum, leaving the rest to state and local option. Ravitch says the curriculum might look like "concentric circles":
One ring will be the skills and ideas that everyone in the nation ( and the world) needs to know; another ring will be peculiar to the state (reflecting its history, geography, and regional concerns); and the third will be local. This ensures enough uniformity so that children have equal opportunity to learn what their peers are learning elsewhere.
Is it practical for us to consider national standards? Some people take the spectacular failure of the original U.S. and world history standards -- and the recent fizzle of the English standards -- as proof that national standards can't be done here. But we should not be surprised that we didn't get these standards right the first time. And we should be encouraged by the way the criticism of the history standards led to a national debate about what our students should be learning -- and to a much-improved version of the standards.
The biggest stumbling block to national standards is the fear that they will lead, somewhere down the road, to federal control. But, as Ravitch says, if the standards are proposed by independent bodies, which has been the plan all along, and reviewed and monitored by a mechanism that the governors create, there is no possibility for interference by the federal government.
The governors and business leaders who met at the education summit took a big step forward when they embraced the idea of high standards. They can't stop there. Having 50 or 15,000 different curriculums or, even worse, a different curriculum in every school, is not going to lead to high standards. Indeed, most will be low. And in a country with a highly mobile population, the existence of many different curriculums will mean educational chaos. There is no successful educational system anywhere in the world where standards are left to local control. Where they are not national, they are closely coordinated. We ignore other countries' experience at our peril.