As adoptions of the common standards roll across the country, it isn’t too surprising that people are coming out of the woodwork to offer products and services designed to support the new standards in some way. After all, there’s a lot of societal good work to be done when 43 states and the District of Columbia have decided to adopt the new learning goals.
No doubt some of these products and services will be intelligent, well-thought-out, helpful additions to the world of implementation. And no doubt that some of them will be, umm, something less than that. States and districts will have no small task in sorting through which is which.
One recent addition to the increasingly crowded marketplace of goods and services for common standards caught my eye for its sense of style. Billed like a rock-and-roll band’s tour, it’s a road show of workshops on the new standards and forthcoming common assessments. It comes from the Englewood, Colo.-based Leadership and Learning Center, headed up by standards consultant Douglas B. Reeves.
A common-standards roadshow. I wonder what the tour buses look like. I can’t quite imagine Reeves and his colleagues slumping in the seats, strumming guitars and working out harmonies as they travel between cities, living on booze, junk food and cigarettes. But maybe it’ll be enough of a road show that we will be able to order tour T-shirts; you know, in black, emblazoned with a catchy slogan on the front (“Common Standards, Coming Soon to a School Near You!” or “Common Standards: The Time is Now!”) and a list of tour cities and dates on the back?