Is it time for national education standards?
Posted: 10:09 AM ET
Add a commentDave Schechter
CNN Senior National Editor
CNN Senior National Editor
While the kids, most of them anyway, are on summer vacation, here’s an issue to consider: Has the time passed when it makes sense for each state to have its own standards for what children are taught in grades K-12?
The kids may not be thinking about school, but state education officials across the country face an August due date (some no doubt will ask for an extension) on whether to accept a proposed set of national standards for core subjects – English language arts, history, social studies, science and math, with goals specified by grade and subject. You can read them here.
Growing up in Illinois, we studied Abraham Lincoln. It makes sense to learn your state’s history. But shouldn’t students from Maine to California, from Washington to Florida, be at par with each other on the core subjects?
Once upon a time the American population was less mobile, less urban. After World War II, America was on the move; out of the small towns, into the cities, expanding the suburbs. Companies opened more offices in more states. Today, unlike the generations before them, Gen X and Millenials expect to hold multiple jobs in their lifetimes. Employers don’t want to worry that job-seekers from a particular state are not properly educated.
The proposed standards, Sam Dillon wrote in The New York Times “would replace the nation’s motley current checkerboard of locally written standards, which vary greatly in content and sophistication.”
“I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education,” Chester