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The Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss

What Common Core State Standards are -- and aren't

So now we have a set of standards for math and English language arts that were designed for all states to adopt so learning could be more uniform across the country.

On Wednesday, the folks behind the initiative -- the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association -- released the standards that spell out what children are expected to learn in those two subjects from kindergarten through the end of high school.

There’s no good way to argue against the notion that a student in Florida should learn the same important concepts and skills as a kid in Alaska, especially considering the current hodgepodge of state standards -- some of which expose students to academic garbage.

But we should keep in mind what the results of the Common Core State Standards actually are -- and what they aren’t.

The idea behind the initiative was to uniformly boost student achievement across the country. The notion of national standards isn’t a new idea in the United States, where there is a strong tradition of local control over education. But it gained new impetus after the federal No Child Left Behind law led some states to weaken their standards as governors looked for ways to cut education costs.

National standards were embraced by President Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who made the adoption of the Common Core standards a requirement of his $4 billion Race to the Top competition.

Though Duncan says the department had nothing to do with drawing up the standards, it most certainly wasn't a powerless bystander in its promotion.

Different education groups rushed Wednesday to praise the standards, which most states will review over the summer before adopting them as their own.

So we know what the standards actually are. What they aren’t is another matter.

If anybody is expecting these standards all by themselves to make much of a difference in schools they will be sorely disappointed.

No set of standards has much meaning without equitable resources to ensure that teachers are trained well enough to reach kids who live in widely different circumstances.

And we are a long way from equitable distribution of education resources, a problem being made worse by Duncan’s Race to the Top competition. Deep budget crises in states threatening thousands of teachers' jobs are creating problems that no standards can overcome.

Another issue is the next step. After states adopt the standards, then what? Well, it is likely that what comes next are expensive new standardized tests that will only further the education world’s current obsession with these assessments. The big winners here will be test creation companies.

I also wonder about the speed with which students are supposed to progress under these standards in the earliest grades. Are youngsters being asked to do things that many of them are not developmentally ready to do?

Author Richard Whitmire, in his book “Why Boys Fail,” makes the case that many boys, who acquire literacy skills later than girls, are being asked to read and write far earlier than they are ready to and are falling behind in academic achievement.

What, for example, will happen to a youngster who doesn’t manage to accomplish the following new kindergarten standard in language arts by the time they start first grade:

“Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.”

or

“Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose opinion pieces in which they tell a reader the topic or the name of the book they are writing about and state an opinion or preference about the topic or book (e.g., My favorite book is...)."

Or the first grader who hasn’t grasped how to read well yet but are, according to the standaqrds, supposed to be able to do the following by the time second grade rolls around?

"Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding."

"Read grade-level text orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression."

"Use context to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as necessary."

Are children who still have trouble reading in second grade labeled failures already? If districts don't have ways to help these kids catch up before they are too far behind to catch up, well-structured and ambitious and cohesive standards won't mean a whole lot.

Some people in American education reform circles contend that we are falling behind other countries with high-achieving school systems, in large part, because we don’t have national standards.

Stanford University Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who served as Obama’s chief education adviser during the presidential transition, shows otherwise in her book, “The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future.”

She writes about how Finland - now widely hailed by U.S. policymakers - reformed school system, not by establishing a highly centralized national system with detailed national standards but by shifting “to a more localized system in which highly trained teachers design curriculum around very lean national standards." All assessments are school-based, designed by teachers, rather than standardized.