A step down: Federal education standards
THE OBAMA administration plans to make states adopt proposed national academic standards as a condition for receipt of federal education grants. The problem is what the administration has proposed is not near the quality of what the Commonwealth already has.
High academic standards are the foundation of Massachusetts’s landmark education reform success. They set goals for students to reach in each year of elementary, middle, and secondary school. The standards are rigorous, but Massachusetts students have proven year after year that they are up to the challenge.
The latest draft of national English language arts and math standards looks very different. The prestigious National Math Advisory Panel identified algebra as the key to higher-level math study and recommended that more students should be ready to enroll in Algebra I by eighth grade. But it is unlikely that these standards could even support the teaching of such a course in ninth grade.
Rather than relying on English teachers to determine the relative complexity of the texts they would assign, the draft also recommends use of a formula that would be unusable by the average teacher. Indeed, the formula shows “The Grapes of Wrath’’ to be at a second- or third-grade level of complexity.
Some argue that subsequent drafts of the national standards will be better. However, they are based on a fundamentally different foundation than those in place in Massachusetts.
While the Commonwealth’s standards steadily move to higher levels of academic
