The Death of Quality by Consensus

What to Avoid in the Search for Common Standards

By Quentin Suffren

At last, it’s official: What was a call for common standards is now a full-fledged movement. Leading it are the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association, which plan to create a set of common standards in English language arts and math, with grade-by-grade progression standards, by year’s end—an incredibly ambitious undertaking. Their aim is to fashion sets of clearer and more-rigorous standards aligned with college- and workplace-readiness expectations. Given the crowd that attended the meeting to launch the effort, representing 40 or so states, it’s safe to say that interest in common standards runs high.

For good reason. More than seven years into the No Child Left Behind era, it’s become painfully evident that there are numerous interpretations of “accountability” across just as many states (a recent report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, “The Accountability Illusion,” sizes this up well). At the core of this inconsistency are the almost 50 sets of state content standards, many of which are mediocre in quality, that mandate course expectations for kindergarten through grade 12. These standards serve as the foundation for course curricula, but in too many states they are capricious, bloated, and unwieldy.

Fortunately, most people can now agree that algebra or biology course content shouldn’t vary by much from one place to another. Education policy types of every political shade and interest have been more or less in unison with this approach for some time. And educators are clamoring for greater clarity and quality in these all-important...