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Many States Adopt National Standards for Their Schools – Do high standards really help kids?

July 21, 2010 /

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Less than two months after the nation’s governors and state school chiefs released their final recommendations for national education standards, 27 states have adopted them and about a dozen more are expected to do so in the next two weeks.

By TAMAR LEWIN

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/education/21standards.html?_r=1&hp

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Do high standards really help kids?

Today we learn from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute http://edexcellence.net/index.cfm/news_the-state-of-state-standards-and-the-common-core-in-2010 that the proposed national math and English-language standards are “clearly superior” to those standards in most of the states. Well, so what? Are national standards an effective education reform?

A second report http://epicpolicy.org/publication/common-core-standards , coincidentally (?) released on the same day as the Fordham assessment of state standards, gives this answer: Not really.

Its author, William J. Mathis, managing director of the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder http://www.epicpolicy.org/ , looked at the available research and concludes that there is very little evidence to prove that establishing national academic standards for K-12 schools will improve the quality of American public education.

“It is almost irrelevant,” Mathis said.

Full Story: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/national-standards/will-high-standards-really-hel.html?hpid=sec-education