The Case for National Standards in American Education

By Rudy Crew, Paul Vallas, & Michael Casserly

Efforts to raise student achievement in the nation’s urban schools are paying off. Math and reading scores are going up—in most cases outpacing the national average for improvement—while superintendents are staying on the job longer and more schools are debunking the myth that urban schools can’t perform at high levels.

Increasingly, though, it is becoming clear that even the best efforts will not get all students to the levels of performance needed to compete in today’s global economy, unless we repair the patchwork system of U.S. standards that encourages high expectations in one community while discouraging those expectations in another.

In the absence of a clear and consistent set of national academic standards for what should be expected of all children, each state instead sets its own standards for what kids should know and be able to do. Sometimes these standards are high; often they are not. Either way, they drive the teaching and learning in America’s classrooms and serve to perpetuate the nation’s educational inequities at a time when we should be working to overcome them. It’s as if we are telling all our students to climb a mountain to get a high school diploma, yet while some work hard to reach a 9,000-foot peak, others are asked to scramble...