One for All. All for One?

A look at the not-so-new, but gaining speed, push for common education standards across the country.

[caption id="attachment_2102" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Illustrations by Daniel Vasconcellos"][/caption]

Compared with the typical pace of politics and the adoption of education policy, the Common Core State Standards Initiative has developed at a lightning-fast rate. In 2009 and 2010, drafts of the standards were written, public comments were made, and a final draft was produced. And in one short, hot summer, state after state signed on to a common definition of the skills and knowledge their students should have in math and English at various points during their academic careers.

Considering the long tradition of local control in American education, this is no small feat. But those who have been closer to the movement know that the events leading to their development and adoption did not occur over the course of a year. Politicians and education leaders — including many Harvard Graduate School of Education alumni and faculty — have debated the merits of national standards for decades. Their experiences have given them insight into why the movement is gaining traction now and where it might go in the future.

A Rudderless System

Senior Lecturer Paul Reville, secretary of education for Massachusetts, held various roles over the past two decades that placed him in the middle of the discussion of measuring progress and setting education goals. The former president of the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy and former executive director of the Pew Forum on Standards-Based Reform can trace his personal memories of the debate back to the mid-1980s. There was a growing perception then of a rudderless education system that lacked clear goals, he says.

“I think that this [current movement] is all part and parcel of the education reform movement generally and the perception growing in the mid-’80s that what we were doing in education was outdated and outmoded,” Reville says.

Spurred by concerns about international competition, economic troubles, and a perceived stagnation or regression in student performance outlined by the now famous 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, the standards debate gained new life as politicians looked for ways to clarify goals, measure progress, and hold schools accountable.

Chief among those politicians was President George H.W. Bush. In 1989, following vows that his presidency would focus on education reform, he met with state governors at a national education summit in Charlottesville, Va. A joint statement issued by the president and the governors at the start of the summit acknowledged that education should remain a state responsibility and a local function. But the document outlining objectives at the close of the summit was rife with language now common in the education reform debate — accountability, competitiveness, readiness, and national goals.

The summit brought attention to and built momentum for the movement for national educational objectives. It brought together governors who believed education reform was an important moral and economic issue. It led to an announcement of national education goals by the president four months later. Moreover, it led to more thought and discussion by governors about equity within their states. And one did not have to make a large leap in logic to apply that ideology to the country as a whole, Reville says.

“If you draw the conclusion that all the children in your state are the responsibility of the state’s education system irrespective of the geographic accident of birth … then you don’t want there to be widely variable standards” on a national level, he says.

The problem, according to Fordham Institute President Chester Finn, M.A.T.’67, Ed.D.’70, was found in the details.

“There was a general agreement that yes, every kid in every school should demonstrate proficiencies in core subjects,” he says. “But what the heck are proficiencies?”

As chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, Finn applauded when Bush handed out grants for states to develop national standards for core subjects. And then he was disappointed when the movement gained no traction. The standards movement within states was slow and arduous on the ground as leaders struggled to find fair measures.

The summit did signal advances for the conversation on the 30,000-foot policy level, but it didn’t lead to widespread reform. And it certainly didn’t convince states to turn education over to federal control. Bush’s calls for an American Achievement Test in certain grades didn’t make it through Congress. It appeared that while leaders recognized that there was an issue that needed to be addressed, anything that smacked of federal intervention in education remained something of a third rail that no member of Congress wanted to touch. This lesson was not lost on the chair of the Charlottesville summit — an activist governor from Arkansas who would soon be involved in the education reform debate from a completely different vantage point.

The Clinton Years

Just around the time of the Charlottesville forum, Marshall “Mike” Smith, Ed.M.’63, Ed.D.’70, was coauthoring an article on national curriculum in the United States that would lead to proposals for standard-based reform. He has advised on education matters for multiple administrations, including the current one.

In 1991, Bush signed legislation creating a National Council on Education Standards and Testing and called for the development of voluntary national testing as part of his “America 2000” initiative. Although Bush was voted out of office, his basic ideas for education reform survived. Academic Dean Robert Schwartz, C.A.S.’68, and Smith served on a transition team that wrote a report stating that fundamentally, the standards movement was headed in the right direction. Plans to provide money to states to put standards in place were made, and the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act included tying Title I money to standardization across districts within states.

“We used a little leverage,” Smith says. “We said, ‘Gosh, guys, Title I money goes to poor schools. We want every one of those schools to have standards, and they have to be the same as [the standards for] other kids in their state.’”

Following these advances in standardization within states, President Bill Clinton signed the Goals 2000 Educate America Act in 1994. It established an outcomes-based framework to set goals of American student achievement relative to students in other nations. Graduation rates, teacher quality, student preparation, teacher development, and literacy were other national goals listed in the legislation.It also provided for federal funding to allow schools to achieve these goals. Voluntary national testing was proposed again.

These efforts became something of a target for the Newt Gingrich–led Congress in the mid-’90s, however.

“Republicans saw the president getting leverage out of this and they went crazy,” Smith says.

Republican Congressman Bill Goodling, chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, spoke out against the testing program on the floor of the House, calling it “Smith’s Folly.”

Smith says, “I remember chuckling to myself, thinking, ‘Well, Seward’s Folly turned out OK.’”

With Republicans waiting to pounce on anything that looked like further expansion of the federal government, Clinton used the second education summit, in 1996, to make clear that the education reform movement wasn’t about enforcing federal standards on the states. It was about state responsibility.

“If this had been left entirely to the politics of Washington and Congress, this [recent interest in common standards] never would’ve happened,” says Schwartz, a major contributor to the standards-based reform movement for decades.

Schwartz recalls the 1996 summit as a “locking of arms” moment among Democratic and moderate Republican governors, as well as a lineup of heavy-hitting corporate CEOs who were convinced that standards-based reform was the answer for the country to remain competitive in the global economy. Aware of this issue but also of the political dynamics of the movement, Clinton was not a major presence at the summit, which was held at IBM in Palisades, N.Y. He did, however, speak candidly to governors at the summit — out of earshot of the media, Schwartz remembers.

“He said, ‘Look, this is good politics as well as good policy. No governor has lost an election because he supported education reform.’”

Achieve, Inc., a nonprofit education reform organization that helps states raise academic standards and education requirements as well as improve assessments and strengthen accountability, was born out of the 1996 summit. Schwartz served as president of the independent, Washington, D.C.–based organization from 1997 to 2002. A supporter of the Common Core State Standards Initiative since its inception, Achieve has led initiatives such as the American Diploma Project Network, a coalition of states looking to better align high school demands with college and career expectations of students. Its creation signaled a shift toward increased collaboration across states in expectations, measurement, and accountability.

But, while the second summit helped stabilize the standards movement, like the first education summit, its momentum only went so far. An attempt by Clinton in 1996 to develop voluntary assessments for fourth-graders in reading and eighth-graders in math was thwarted when Congress refused to fund it. The death knell for Goals 2000 sounded shortly after the Clinton presidency. In late 2001, Congress eliminated its funding.

Teacher Concerns

In addition to facing challenges from the right, the national standards movement had to navigate around objections from some constituencies on the left. Professional educators and their organizations were largely absent from the education summits, and complaints against policy shifts that encouraged “narrowing of the curriculum” and “teaching to the test” began to crop up.

Finn, a self-identified Republican, “at least on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,” says he is one of the few people who has consistently supported standards over the past two decades. He says the political fallout that has led to the starting and stalling process has been messy, “but it’s very American.” He recalls a comment he made about the narrow political window for the standards movement as “the only significant epigram I ever coined in 66 years on this planet.

“I said, ‘The problem with national testing is that conservatives don’t like the national and liberals don’t like testing.’”

Christine Carr, Ed.M.’99, a social sciences teacher at Hopkinton High School in Massachusetts, says the standards movement is a noble effort, but she is dubious about the execution of it. She’s been involved in an effort to design curriculum within her district, which might involve four education professionals in a room discussing the writing curriculum, and has proven difficult. She shudders to think what an effort that transcends states might involve.

Standards-based assessment can quash creativity in the classroom, Carr says. Some of her best moments working with students are spontaneous. But at times she finds herself thinking about the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests rather than simply seizing upon a teachable moment.

“I have to stop and make a judgment on the spot,” she says. “Now I might say, ‘Gee, I have to give this test in X amount of days and I don’t really have time.’ And that’s in a school in a high-performing district with students who are doing quite well.”

Carr’s advice about the standards movement is “proceed with caution.” While policymakers make and remake standards and debate goals, teachers are working in real time. The standards, if done wrong, could serve as a distraction that narrows the curriculum and inhibits creativity that is sometimes needed to get through to students, she warns.

Reville acknowledges this concern. A teacher and principal early in his career, he says the standards are not about creating a “teacher-proof curriculum.” In their best form, standards are a “relatively spare” statement of what students should know at various points of their academic careers.

“Policymakers should be deferential,” he says. “There are many roads to Rome, so to speak. So there are a variety of ways of getting a student proficient in math, for example.”

No Child Left Behind

The election of President George W. Bush may have signaled a philosophical shift by the resident of the White House in many respects. But it didn’t slow down the standards-based reform movement. In fact, the initiatives that Clinton failed to pass because they were seen as federal overreach were less prescriptive than the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act — passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2001.

NCLB increased federal funding in education and required states to develop assessments for students starting in the third grade in order to receive federal funding. Schools’ performances on these tests was tied to funding. The usual complaints about narrowing of the curriculum and teaching to the test surfaced, as did the question of allocating resources away from already troubled schools. While in some ways it signaled a new era of accountability for schools, the act stipulated that states set the standards. Because so much was at stake, it led some to install low standards, effectively creating a “race to the bottom” to protect against school failure. This created a system of perverse incentives and brought more attention to the educational inequities between states.

“The big unintended consequence of No Child Left Behind was to bring to the surface the kind of absurdity of trying to have a single accountability system superimposed after each state had developed its own standards, tests, and definition of proficiency,” Schwartz says. “We’re living in a world in which Massachusetts, which leads the country in NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress], has half of its schools labeled ‘failing’ and where Alabama has a single-digit number of schools in the ‘failing’ category.”

That lesson from No Child Left Behind, combined with the continued concern about America’s economic competitiveness, set the stage for the current Common Core Standards Initiative — an initiative by state leaders now convinced that individual state silos are not the way to go when it comes to setting standards. “An awful lot of people, including state leaders, have gotten the message that state standards have been a major disappointment,” Finn says.

So just as the Clinton administration policy helped pave the way for education reforms of the second Bush administration, the shortcomings of No Child Left Behind helped along a reform initiative supported by the Obama administration. Of course, as supporters of the Common Core Standards Initiative will tell you, the effort is a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

But one doesn’t have to look far to see federal support for the initiative. The Department of Education’s Race to the Top program, which is allocating billions of federal dollars to states on a state-by-state application basis, included state commitments to the Common Core as one of the criteria assessed in the applications. Massachusetts, which did not receive funding in the first round of awards but did receive $250 million in the second round after signing on to the standards, is something of a poster child of the discussion.

Massachusetts’ state standards are seen as a model for other states and the commonwealth boasts the top students in the nation on the basis of the NAEP. Critics of Massachusetts’ decision to adopt the new standards have wondered if Bay State leaders allowed the motivation of receiving federal money to supersede the goal of having standards that best serve the commonwealth’s students.

Reville, who as Massachusetts secretary of education was responsible for putting together the Race to the Top applications, says he would not have supported the move to embrace the standards movement if he felt it would water down the commonwealth’s standards. He believes there is much to be gained by states pooling resources and sharing ideas. And if Massachusetts has something to contribute to a movement that is being adopted by the vast majority of states, withholding participation would be bad for the country and the commonwealth.

“The alternative is to sit on the sidelines with our arms folded,” he says. “In addition to being negligent of our responsibilities as citizens of this nation, it will guarantee a road to irrelevance for Massachusetts.”

Looking Ahead

So what lies ahead for the standards movement, particularly with the Republican wins in the 2010 election? Unlike many education issues, the United States is a follower, not a leader in nationwide standards. Virtually every country the United States is competing with has national standards, Schwartz says. Through the 1960s, education was a strictly local matter in nearly every state. The federal government had no place in K–12 education until the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 authorized federally funded education programs and set up measures to guard against educational inequality.

Those equality issues and the push and pull of federal, state, and local involvement remain an issue today. Finn is heartened by the fact that there will be no direct federal involvement in the standards but worries what impact the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind will have on the Common Core implementation. He sees the Common Core initiative as the setting of a quality destination.

“Though they’re not perfect according to our reviewers and my own eyeballing, they are much better than I ever thought they would be,” he says of the reforms. “They’re better than three-quarters of the states and a toss up in other cases.”

But setting a destination and getting there are two very different things. Just as implementing ideas that sprang out of the Education Summit in 1989 was more difficult than agreeing on the need for reform, so too will implementing the vision of the Common Core be easier said than done. Collaboration can produce best practices that lead to better measures and more prepared teachers, but it can also lead to poor compromises, disjointed goals, and the sacrifice of excellence to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Reville believes the answer will be vigilance at every level. Leaders will have to be proactive and he has vowed that Massachusetts will not support the standards if they veer off course and don’t add value.

“We haven’t signed away our prerogatives on standards and assessment forever,” he says.

While it may go against the historical roots of a nation formed from individual colonies, in the eyes of supporters of the standards movement, some degree of shared responsibility for the competitiveness and prosperity of the nation is long overdue. With anxiety over international competitiveness at an all-time high, Finn believes there is enough support to create a more united educational blueprint.

“If China really is going to eat our lunch and people understand that education has something to do with our response, the right way to do that is not to propose that kids in Kansas and kids in Maine and kids in New Mexico should be learning different things,” he says.

— Greg Esposito, Ed.M.’10, is a former education writer with The Roanoke Times.