Do high standards really help kids?

22-7-2010

7.22.10 - The Thomas B. Fordham Institute tells us that the proposed national math and English-language standards are “clearly superior” to those standards in most of the states. Well, so what? Are national standards an effective education reform?

Today we learn from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute that the proposed national math and English-language standards are “clearly superior” to those standards in most of the states. Well, so what? Are national standards an effective education reform?

A second report, coincidentally (?) released on the same day as the Fordham assessment of state standards, gives this answer: Not really.

 

Its author, William J. Mathis, managing director of the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, looked at the available research and concludes that there is very little evidence to prove that establishing national academic standards for K-12 schools will improve the quality of American public education.

“It is almost irrelevant,” Mathis said.

Let’s take it from the top:

The Fordham report, as my colleague 21/AR2010072100023.html">Nick Anderson reported in this article, compared the Common Core Standards for math and English language arts with those in the 50 states and Washington D.C. It concludes that the voluntary national standards -- which have been adopted by 27 states with perhaps a dozen expected to follow soon -- are "clearly superior" to the math standards in 39 states and to the English-language arts standards in 37 states, including Maryland.

The institute’s president, Chester E. Finn Jr., does say that “good standards are not a cure-all,” a painfully obvious observation.

The institute’s report notes, Anderson reports, that the current D.C. standards in English are superior to the common core standards, even though D.C. public schools have long been among the weakest in the country. (Washington Post)