One size fits none

LITTLE ROCK — The Obama administration and Gates Foundation are orchestrating an effort to get every state to adopt a set of national standards for public elementary and secondary schools.

These standards describe what students should learn in each subject in each grade. Eventually these standards can be used to develop national high-stakes tests, which will shape the curriculum in every school.

National standards are a seductive but dangerous idea. People tend to support national standards because they imagine that they will be the ones deciding what everyone else should learn. Dictatorship always sounds more appealing when you fantasize that you will be the dictator.

But the reality is that we are a large, diverse and decentralized country with strong democratic traditions, making national standardssetting a futile task.

Either the standards are too prescriptive and are unable to attract the broad consensus necessary for adoption, or they are vague enough to form a national coalition but so vague that they are entirely useless.

The past two efforts at developing national standards illustrate each type of failure. During the early 1990s, under President George H.W. Bush, an attempt at writing national standards faltered when the history standards were perceived to be prescribing a left-wing agenda. The U.S. Senate actually rejected those standards 99 to 0. Then in the late nineties under President Bill Clinton the national standards push avoided attracting this type of opposition by making the standards very loose and general. The result was that they had no effect. So now we are like Sisyphus, rolling the national standards stone back up the hill yet again.

Even if we could somehow thread the needle and win national adoption of standards that were rigorous and specific, there is no reason to believe that they would stay that way. Once the automobile of national standards is built, eventually someone will gain control of the wheel and drive it in a direction you oppose. And if the entire nation is governed by those standards, there is no hopping out of the car. We’ll all drive over the cliff together.

The virtue of developing standards at the state, district and school level is that it accommodates the legitimate diversity of opinion about how children could best be educated. No one suggests that math is fundamentally different in different places, but whether, for example, all children should be taught long division in 3rd grade is not a settled question. If we adopt national standards, then we destroy the laboratory of the states that might help us learn about which approaches are more effective for which students.

The idea that all students nationwide should be learning the same thing at the same age denies the reality of how diverse our children are. Some of our children are more advanced and would be bored silly if we don’t allow them to progress at a more rapid rate. Other students need more time to master their material. Some students would benefit from a greater emphasis on the arts, while others might thrive with greater emphasis on science. To impose a single curriculum on all students is to build a system where one size fits none.

We don’t need national standards to prevent states from dumbing down their own standards. We already have a national test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered by the U.S. Department of Education, to show how states are performing on a common yardstick and to shame those that set the bar too low. Illinois, for example, isn’t fooling anyone when it says that 82% of its 8th graders are proficient in reading because according to NAEP only 30% are proficient. The beauty of NAEP is that it provides information without forcing conformity to a single, national curriculum.

Nor is it the case that adopting national standards would close the achievement gap between the U.S. and our leading economic competitors. Yes, many of the countries that best us on international tests have national standards, but so do manyof the countries that lag behind us. If there really were one true way to educate all children, why stop at national standards? Why not have global standards with a global curriculum?

We would oppose global standards for the same reasons we should oppose national standards. Making education uniform at too high of a level of aggregation ignores the diversity of needs of our children as well as the diversity of opinion about how best to serve those needs. And giving people at the national or global level the power to determine what everyone should learn is dangerous because they will someday use that power to promote unproductive or even harmful ideas.

Jay P. Greene is the endowed professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas.