What Common Standards for Schools Can and Can’t Do

Like many families, we try to escape the summer heat by going north. This year we spent a week in New Brunswick, Canada, at Shediac Beach, the self-proclaimed lobster capital of the world. But wait — Rockport, Maine, also calls itself the lobster capital of the world and has harvest data to back it up. Meanwhile, Nova Scotia claims the largest lobster ever caught, a 44-lb. (20 kg) monster capable of devouring a house pet. So what determines lobster capitaldom? Harvesting? Big ones? A festival like the one in Shediac? Who decides, anyway?

Unfortunately, similar definitional confusion plagues an industry far more central to American life: our public education system.

(See TIME’s photo-essay “Paying Kids for Good Grades: Does It Work?”)

Today states, school districts, and in some cases individual schools are allowed to set both their academic standards and the tests to determine whether students are reaching them. In other words, lots of different entities get to decide whether to call themselves “education capitals.” Not surprisingly, many claim to be high performers. And because there are so much conflicting data, it’s often hard even for those in the education field to make heads or tails of it.

This localized approach to education policy results in highly variable quality around the country as well as a systemic shortchanging of low-income and minority students. Over the past two decades, the federal government has taken steps, with modest and mixed results, to address achievement gaps. But the variance problem persists. For example, 47% of Massachusetts’ fourth-graders are proficient in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a test regularly given to a sample of students, with no stakes attached) while just 33% of Wisconsin’s fourth-graders are. But based on its own state tests, Wisconsin proclaims that 81% of its kids are proficient in reading. All Secretary of Education Arne Duncan can do is complain that states are “lying to children and parents.”

There’s a state-led effort to change this. During the past year, organizations representing the nation’s governors, chief state education officers and standards experts came together to develop a new set of academic standards in English and math. A recent analysis by the Fordham Foundation found that the proposed math standards were as good as or better than the standards currently used in every state. Fordham found the English standards to be as good as or better than all but those in California, Indiana, and D.C.

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So far, 37 states have committed to adopting these standards, known as the Common Core. That’s a remarkable number, given how controversial national standards were only a decade ago.

But excitement about the new standards is creating some confusion — and exaggeration — about what they can be expected to accomplish. Proponents say the Common Core is the only way to deal with today’s variance between states. But if Congress or the White House really wanted to, Washington could address the unevenness of state standards by providing more specificity and oversight of how passing scores on tests are set by states — with more public transparency of that process. Meanwhile, unless states agree to use common assessments with comparable passing scores to test how well students are learning — something that has yet to be decided — we’ll still have trouble comparing outcomes from state to state.

In the meantime, Common Core advocates point to the standards used by countries that do well on international tests as a sign that we’re headed in the right direction. But some of the lowest-performing countries use nationwide standards too. They are not a panacea.

(See TIME’s video “A Talk with Robert Bobb About Detroit Public Schools.”)

So what’s the big deal?

Assuming quality and comparability are maintained, the new standards offer a common denominator in public education to help think about student performance and productivity. Sounds wonky, but it’s hard to overstate the importance of this to the national effort to improve schools across 50 states and thousands of communities. Right now, anything goes in this $650 billion industry. A common benchmark for quality would help change that.

A common baseline would also empower teachers to meaningfully compare their work with the work of peers in other states. It would force publishers and other education vendors to compete using actual results that are common across states rather than based on relationships, politics and claims that are often impossible to judge. Commonality would also make it harder for politicians and various stakeholders to hide behind their own data and claim their states as educational capitals when they’re not.

Common standards would, of course, leave unaddressed a variety of challenges facing schools, such as inequitable financing, uneven teacher quality and an anemic research-and-development sector. Still, Common Core is a watershed achievement, because large-scale improvement is impossible as long as we treat school quality with the same casualness as we do a debate over lobsters.

Rotherham, who writes the EduWonk blog, is a co-founder of and partner at Bellwether Education, a nonprofit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students.

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