National Standards

On Saturday morning, Dr. Alonso addressed the second year MAT graduates at Hopkins. Despite being ill, he spoke very well, and I really keyed into the his comments on National Standards for education. He talked about how the movement in the past decade has been for national accountability through No Child Left Behind, but that it has been very open to the states to set their standards and form their own assessments. To some degree this makes sense without question - schools across the country are essentially being compared, it is only fair for them to be compared based on the same criteria. However, it is a constitutionally defined issue: education is a state's right. Therefore, each state should have the authority to define what the children in that jurisdiction should know and be able to do. So how do we balance the constitutional issue with comparing cities and states and schools on an equal level? Does this mean we need a constitutional amendment claiming education to be a federal responsibility? That would cause a mess of funding issues - states are not going to want to pay for what they cannot control... Or does it mean that we need to do with national comparisons since the tests and standards are not the same.

Another issue this brings up is America's place in the global market. Studies like the TIMSS keep being published comparing the United States to other countries around the world. Those competitors have a unified national curriculum, so when finding average scores of the country they are actually representative of what all children know or at least have been taught. When trying to give a similar assessment to students in the United States, it is harder to generalize because there are 50 different sets of standards trying to be compiled into one analysis. If there were a national curriculum and national assessments, it would become much easier and clearer to compare the United States, as a country rather than as 50 independent entities, to other developing countries that are united, at least educationally, under one policy.