Washington Post’s Jay Mathews on National Standards

For a recent take on the never ending debate about national educational standards in a nation of decentralized school districts, here’s a column from the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews: 

Despite my many bets to the contrary, the movement for national learning standards still lives. More than 40 states (including Maryland, but not Virginia) plus the District have enlisted. They are executing plans for instruction in all grades and, eventually, common assessments in math and English language arts.

It sounds great. But it won’t help and won’t work. Such specific standards stifle creativity and conflict with a two-century American preference for local decisionmaking about schools.

The decentralized nature of our education system is the least of our problems. We should focus on better teaching methods and better training of teachers, as well as school structures that help educators work more as teams. Those teachers could then employ whatever methods and standards make sense for their students.

Nonetheless, good people in national and state organizations, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are moving ahead with national standards (or common standards, as they are also called). I was resigning myself to much wasted time on this project until I read a post by University of Arkansas education reform professor Jay P. Greene on his jaypgreene.com blog.

Greene predicts the national standards movement will collapse. Many of his reasons are insightful, although the first one—Republican opposition killing Washington support for standards–is the weakest. That would require this egg-heady education issue to become hot politically, about as likely as the GOP running on revival of grammar instruction.

For the full article, go here: 

 

What do you think?