As States Feel Pressed to Revisit Standards, Calls Are Being Renewed to Tighten Them

Two prominent national organizations have declared in the past month that “less is more” in state standards for what students should know and be able to do.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, in a report on pre-K-8 math curricula, called for an approach that focuses on a “small number of significant mathematical ‘targets’ for each grade level.”

Similarly, the National Research Council argued in a report on science education that state and national standards and curricula should “identify a few core ideas in a discipline and elaborate on how those ideas can be cumulatively...