National Education Standards: To Be or Not to...

Should the United States have national standardsfor our education system? Americans have beendebating this question for the last quarter of acentury. If you are trying to make up your ownmind and think the decision should be simple,

you’re likely to be surprised.In a system in which localities and states pay about 93

percent of the cost of schooling and the federal governmenthas no constitutional role in education, the nation has flirtedwith the idea of injecting broader national control into educa-tion policy. The United States has seen historic episodes offederal or national initiatives in education. These episodesinclude efforts to bolster math and science capability in

response to Sputnik, the quest for racial and ethnic equitythrough the courts, efforts to equalize resources in publicschools, and an outright seizure of control in crucial areas ofpolicy and practice through No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

In parallel efforts since the mid-1980s, policymakers havemade sporadic attempts to raise achievement levels bycreating both a national definition of what students should betaught and a national test to see whether schools weresuccessfully bolstering achievement. This effort was touchedoff by the 1983 report of the National Commission on Educa-tional Excellence, which found the nation “at risk,” althoughits corrective recommendations were directed at local andstate governments.

22 E D U C AT I O N A L L E A D E R S H I P / A P R I L 2 0 1 0

National Education Standards:To Be or Not to Be?

The United States has long been of two mindsabout national education standards.

Paul E. Barton

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By 1989, concern about the U.S. education system’s world-wide status had risen so high that President George H.W.Bush gathered the nation’s governors for a summit to establishgoals for the United States to achieve by 2000. Other calls fornational intervention included the National Council onEducation Standards and Tests, the National Education Stan-dards and Assessment Council, the Clinton administration’sGoals 2000 legislation, and that administration’s partial devel-opment of a voluntary national test, which Congress soonabandoned.

This condensed history conveys the continuing desire foraction at the national level, the failure to bring that desire tofruition, and a lack of agreement and enthusiasm for this levelof federal intervention. America has clearly been of two mindsabout bringing change to our locally based public educationsystem.

One reason we lack agreement is that people place differentdegrees of value on schools’ traditional local control anddiversity, show different degrees of willingness to take therisks involved, and come to different conclusions aboutwhether accompanying challenges can be overcome. Perhapsmost basic, people have different mind-sets about what“national standards” means.

What Are “National Standards”?When people say they are for or against national standards,they often harbor quite different views of what they want tocreate—or protest. Some people have in mind setting stan-

Deborah Meier

I’m for “standards” if we aretalking about a flag held highto see where we are going. But

as a euphemism for a K–12curriculum, standards are a badidea. Setting fixed standards forwhat students should learn meansaiming either too low or toohigh—never on target for eachindividual learner.

Before we decide which methods work in movinglearners forward, we have to at least discuss “to whatends?” Effective standards—of any kind—uphold bothour purposes and our good taste. People quite reasonablydisagree on purposes. Some people may be willing tosacrifice a lot for Purpose A but very little for Purpose B. Agroup may agree on 10 goals for a good writing course, forinstance, but disagree if forced to cut back to five. Andgood taste? Many books eventually declared classics wereat first turned down by publishers and slammed by critics.

Every time we try to fix goals for public schooling, weend up in the same fix as the Constitutional originalists(who assume the U.S. Constitution has one immutablemeaning); we sacrifice flexibility for immutability.

It’s a fact that we don’t know how to teach math well toeveryone. Maybe we never will. It might be fruitful toquestion the assumption that “everyone” must knowadvanced algebra (as opposed to, say, advanced musician-ship). We should also ask what it will cost those whonever “get” algebra—or some other core subject—if thetrend continues to make mastering algebra a roadblock tofurther study. Why don’t we remove the roadblockinstead?

The one demand I’d like to make of U.S. schools is thatthey give young people the tools to lead a powerful publiclife: to be knowledgeable and thoughtful about democracyand the U.S. Constitution. After that, let’s provide choiceswhere we can without polarizing the democracy we aretrying to nourish.

Deborah Meier is Senior Scholar and Adjunct Professor atNew York University’s Steinhardt School of Education. Shehas founded public schools serving low-income, minoritystudents in New York City and Boston; [email protected].

Are National Standards the Right Move?

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dards for the content of what is taughtin any grade or subject in school. Forsome, establishing content standardsmeans increasing the rigor of instruc-tion; for others, it means “standardizing”what knowledge is taught. These twogoals are related but different. Anextreme example of the latter goalwould be the uniformity in France,where at almost any hour, all studentsare studying the same thing.

Some supporters of standards envi-sion a single national test that allstudents would be required to take.Others want both prescribed coursecontent and a national test. There arethose who claim that standards shouldbe voluntary and those who believe thatwe should subject all students to them.

Goals vary: Some want standards to giveteachers information that will improveinstruction, whereas others want anational test to measure performance inan NCLB-like accountability system.

Differences also exist on the “how.”Some people clearly want standards tobe national but to be created andenforced by some agency other than thefederal government (although possiblywith government funding); others want

the federal government to develop andprescribe standards. In another version,both standards and tests would emanatefrom outside the federal government,but they would be used to enforce afederal accountability system—ascenario that I believe would effectivelyfederalize such a test.

Before we can fruitfully discuss issuesinvolved in setting national standards,everyone will have to agree on what we


William H. Schmidt

Well-designed national standards are necessary toimprove schooling in the United States. Withoutsuch standards to guide our fragmented system, we

will continue to fail our children. Even the best U.S. studentsdo not perform as highly as the students of top-performingnations; governors and state education leaders have come torecognize the importance of addressing this lack of competi-tiveness through national standards.

In the United States, we spend a great deal of time arguingabout why we should not have national standards. It’s moreimportant to consider the consequences of our not havingnational standards. International research has shown that top-achieving countries have focused, coherent, and rigorousnational standards. These three characteristics can only beachieved when there is a national center. In a highly frag-mented system with shared decision making, in which statesand even individual districts often establish their own stan-dards, these qualities are almost impossible to achieve.

My argument is twofold. First, if we want to make ourstudents more competitive internationally, both for their ownsake and for the nation, then a move to national standardsgives schooling the chance to become more focused, coherent,and rigorous.

The second consequence of notenacting standards—a more seriousone—is that large numbers of U.S.students will be left behind other U.S.students who simply receive betterschooling. The current system, inwhich students are taught underdifferent standards depending onwhere they live or the social class oftheir parents, is intolerable, especiallyin a democracy. Data show that schooldistricts with higher concentrations of well-educated and well-off parents have more focused and demanding standards.These inequalities are built into the system. In effect, theplaying field is not level, and the very students who mostdepend on schooling as a means to a better life are the oneswho suffer.

My point is not to ignore potential negative effects ofnational standards, but to argue that not moving to such stan-dards has graver consequences. It is detrimental to children’slives, the nation’s economic prospects, and perhaps mostimportant, to equal opportunity itself.

William H. Schmidt is University Distinguished Professor atMichigan State University, East Lansing; [email protected].


When people say they are for or againstnational standards, they often harbordifferent views of what they want to create.

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are after. Although theoptions that individuals orgroups might propose wouldstill entail differing chal-lenges, issues, and values, allparties would at least thenbe on the same page.

Surprising VariationOne complication to devel-oping standards is the exten-sive variation in our educa-tion landscape. A 2009report I wrote for the Educa-tional Testing Service revealshuge variations in content ofinstruction, states’ perform-ance standards, and studentachievement levels across thenation. We could look at thishigh rate of variation in twoways: as a sign that theobstacles to standardizationare insurmountable or asevidence for why a single setof standards is needed.

The amount and degree ofvariation throughout our educationsystem may surprise many readers. Let’sconsider three major areas of variation:(1) the content of instruction from placeto place, (2) the performance standardsstates have set, and (3) student achievement.

Variation in ContentThroughout U.S. history, certain forceshave worked to produce uniformity incurriculum, and others have pushedtoward increasing variation. HistorianDaniel Boorstein has pointed out thatearly U.S. schoolmarms taught a stan-dard English; therefore, unlike Britishcitizens, Americans could understandone another wherever they went in thecountry. McGuffey readers were wide-spread in schools throughout the 19thcentury, and standardized tests havelong been in use.

One would expect textbooks to exert

pressure toward uniformity. Schools inall 50 states generally choose from onlya handful of textbooks for any partic-ular subject or grade. However, there isgreat variation in the levels of studentachievement in any grade across thecountry, and there are large differencesamong district and state prescriptionsof what should be taught. So if text-book publishers are to market them-selves well, they must span a widediversity of instructional objectives. Adetailed review of prescribed contentfor 4th grade instruction in 10 U.S.states, for instance, revealed 108possible learning outcomes, only fourof which were common to all 10 states(Reys, as cited in Beatty, 2008).Publishers are pushed in the directionof covering a vast number of objectives.If we hope to set common standards,we must address the forces thatproduce this tremendous variability.

Variation in Performance StandardsThe U.S. Secretary of Educa-tion recently said that wedon’t need 50 different goal-posts, a reference to NCLB’sprovision that each state canset its own performancestandards. So how muchvariation is there? A lot.Each test’s performance stan-dard is simply a cut point onthe state test that representsthe level at which a testtaker is deemed proficient.The stringency of standardsis difficult to comparebecause each state has itsown tests.

However, the cut pointsfor each state test have been“mapped” onto the nationalscore scale for the NationalAssessment of EducationalProgress (NAEP), and theDepartment of Educationhas published tables

showing where each state’s cut pointfalls on that scale. The percentage ofstudents meeting or exceeding the scorethat NAEP has set as representing profi-ciency ranges from 18 percent in Hawaiiand Mississippi to 38 percent in NewJersey (Barton, 2009, p. 18).

States differ greatly, of course, inaverage income, the richness ofstudents’ experiences before they startschool, and the size of the state’s taxbase. Do these differences account forsome of the variation in how high theyset their requirements for studentachievement? One way to examine thiswould be to map the cut points on eachstate’s test onto that state’s own NAEPscale rather than the national NAEPscale to see how states compare inreaching their own cut points for theirstudent populations. I did this mappingand found that the disparity on thisbasis was greater, not less: The


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percentage of students reaching orexceeding the cut point ranges from 30percent in South Carolina to 88 percentin North Carolina—two adjoining stateswith identical average NAEP scores (seeBarton, 2009, p. 18). So the dynamicsare complicated. A lot of carpentry willbe required to make all goalposts thesame height.

Variation in AchievementBroad variation exists in studentachievement for any particular gradelevel and school subject. The degree ofvariation makes a huge difference in theeffort it will take to raise all U.S.students to the same level. Figure 1 (p. 28) provides a panorama of studentscores on the reading portion of the

1990 and 2004 NAEP assessments atages 9, 13, and 17 for all racial andethnic subgroups. If you place a ruleracross the chart at the point showing 9-year-olds scoring in the 90th percentileto see what percentile it reaches for thescores of 17-year-olds, you’ll see that thebottom fourth of 17-year-olds read nobetter than the top tenth of 9-year-olds.

To gauge the magnitude of this varia-tion, consider that the spread of scoreswithin any one grade level is as great as,or greater than, the difference in theaverage scores from the 4th grade to the12th. This is a lot of variation to dealwith.

Commonality Versus Tolerance for DiversityThe United States is a diverse societycreated by people from many cultures,religions, and parts of the world. Welive in communities and neighborhoodswith extremes in wealth and income.These extreme differences have beenwell tolerated by Americans because weare a land of opportunity. And, becausewe believe that opportunity depends a

Chester E. Finn Jr.

Almost every successful modern nation on thisshrinking planet has national education standards ofsome sort. The United States needs national stan-

dards, too, at least in core subjects.There’s no reason for 5th grade math to differ from Portland,

Maine, to Portland, Oregon, or for reading to be taught differ-ently in Miami, Ohio, than it is in Miami, Florida. Ours is amobile society that’s developing national school “brands” (suchas the Edison and KIPP schools). We have statewide virtualschools that soon will be nationwide, showing that curriculumcan be uniform across state lines. Two recent Fordham Insti-tute studies, The Proficiency Illusion and The Accountability Illusion, have demonstrated that having 50 different sets ofstate-specific standards has proven dysfunctional.

The United States has been edging toward national stan-dards for a quarter century. It was the nation at risk, not justIllinois or Arizona, that the National Commission on Excel-lence in Education warned us about in 1983, and it wasnational education goals that President George H.W. Bush andthe governors set in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1989.

What has stymied orderly movement has been our lack ofany suitable, trusted mechanism for setting and maintainingnational standards and the assessments that must accompanythem if they’re to have traction. Practically nobody wants the

federal government to set and main-tain the standards. And private, discipline-specific groups cannot becounted on to set standards properly;in the early 1990s, their efforts to setvoluntary national standards crashedand burned. The National AssessmentGoverning Board, which decideswhat knowledge and skills theNational Assessment of EducationalProgress (NAEP) should measure, is apossible candidate to maintain national standards. But a livelyargument can (and should) be had as to whether NAEPshould evolve into a national test or remain the “externalauditor.” I tend toward the latter view.

The National Governors Association and the Council ofChief State School Officers have recently taken it upon them-selves to develop “common core” standards in reading/writingand math for states to adopt if they like. I believe this volun-tary approach is right. Secretary of Education Arne Duncanhas said Race to the Top dollars will be used to developaccompanying assessments, although we don’t yet know howor by whom. We still lack a durable, institutional arrangementfor all of this, but we’re finally headed in the right direction.

Chester E. Finn Jr. is President of the Thomas B. FordhamInstitute in Washington, D.C.; [email protected].


A lot of carpentrywill be required tomake all goalpoststhe same height.



lot on education, we want to reduceinequality in our school system.

The American experience has alwaysaccommodated a great deal of disagree-ment about what to teach, how to teachit, and when to teach it. As late asMarch 2009, a panel appointed by Pres-ident George W. Bush tried—again—toput to rest what the New York Timescalled “the long, heated debate overmath teaching methods” (Lewin, 2008).Debates over how to teach reading arestill divisive. Controversies overteaching evolution and other topics stillflare up around the country—at timeseven involving literal textbook fires,such as in West Virginia in the 1970s.

All this diversity and disagreement islike a coil-spring mattress; the weightpressing on one area of the mattress istolerated without affecting the rest ofthe mattress. When we try to settle basicdifferences about education at a nationallevel, however, we elevate the stakes.We open the door for national-levelorganizations to bring pressures andcounter-pressures to bear. As U.S. citi-zens balance a desire for commonalityagainst tolerance for differences, we facethe question of how strongly we want toraise such issues to a court of nationalsettlement.

Up the Hill Again?Beginning in March 2009, signsemerged that supporters of nationalstandards were making another effort tostorm the hill under a new banner:Common Standards. If the word federalhas become tarnished in connectionwith standards, so has the wordnational; both words suggest require-ments emanating from on high, even ifnot from the federal government. TheNational Governors Association, theNational Council of Chief State SchoolOfficers, Achieve, the College Board,and ACT have organized into a strongcoalition. That coalition moved quicklyto get most states to sign an agreement

to unite around a set of common stan-dards. At this point, this meanscommon content standards for thesubject matter to be taught at eachgrade level.

The starting point has been to writestandards for what U.S. students shouldknow when they leave high school to beready for college and career. As thisarticle went to press, the coalition haddrafted standards in math and readingand was putting those drafts through a

process of “validation” by a committeethat the coalition appointed. The nextstep will be to write standards for eachgrade level. Then the question will bewhether the coalition moves on tocreate a common test for each grade inmath and reading and advances to othersubject areas.

At this stage, there is substantialmomentum. As of August 2009, 49states had signed on. Although this “signon” has been from the chief state school


Phillip Schlechty

Will nationalstandardsencourage the

pursuit of excellence ineducation? I think not.Rather, national stan-dards will quickly morphinto national assessmentsand a national system ofenforcement, leading to trivializationand an emphasis on minimums. As Iread about the work of the NationalGovernors Association and theCouncil of Chief State School Officers,I fear that this is the direction in whichwe are headed.

Before we proceed with the develop-ment of national standards, we shouldtake a closer look at Finland. Finlandhas a system of national standards, butit leaves assessment of students up tolocal communities. Before we establishnational standards, we must do asFinland did and arrive at some agree-ment about the purposes of educationin the 21st century and the kind ofsociety we aspire to be. I find little inour discussion about standards thataddresses such issues.

For bureaucrats andcontrol-oriented managers,standards are rules. Theyestablish minimums belowwhich performance shouldnot go. For democraticallyoriented school leaders andothers who see education asthe primary means ofpreserving “the blessings of

liberty to ourselves and our posterity,”standards provide direction ratherthan control. They are sources of guid-ance rather than results to be achieved.They function more like satellites in aglobal positioning system than desti-nations on a map.

Standards should not be fixedpoints. Rather, they should mark ahorizon. We need to understand stan-dards as the ancient Greeks under-stood them: ideals to be pursuedrather than pedestals upon which tostand. Excellence requires the pursuitof an ideal rather than compliancewith minimum expectations.

Phillip Schlechty is Founder and ChiefExecutive Officer of the SchlechtyCenter in Louisville, Kentucky;[email protected].



officials and governors, many state legis-latures have been heavily involved in thestandards-setting movement. It remainsto be seen whether they will go along orbalk. In 2007, the National Conferenceof State Legislatures adopted a measureagainst national standards that favoredhigher standards developed for—andby—each state.

Another element in the mix is the factthat at the end of January, states appliedfor a share of the $48.6 billion ineconomic stimulus funds to be distrib-uted under the American Recovery andReimbursement Act. The selectionprocess, underway as this article goes topress, takes into account whether eachapplying state is engaged in collabora-tive efforts with other states to developcommon standards—a considerableincentive to get with the program.

Learning From ExperienceYears of experience with “standards-based reform” and its transformationinto test-based accountability tells usthat there is more trouble in Accounta-bility City than just lack of common-

ality. A consideration of our currentaccountability landscape and our pastattempts raises four questions.

How can we develop high-qualitycontent standards and tests?There are quality problems with currentcontent standards, as evaluations byindependent researchers and evaluatorshave shown. The tests that accompanythem are typically “cheapies” that do notget far enough below the surface interms of content instruction. Contentstandards, created through compro-mises among committee members, arefar broader than what can be covered ina nine-month school year. And whentests are constructed that merely samplethis broad content—as most do—suchtests are not sensitive to the actualinstruction teachers deliver. Nor do theypick up changes in achievement thatfollow improvements in instruction.

How can schools serve the highest and lowest achievers?The selection of a single cut pointprovides incentives for teachers and

schools to overfocus on students nearthat cut point, to avoid sanctions.Because results are reported in terms ofthe cut point, teachers know nothingabout how students who are far below—or above—that cut point are doing.

Should we contemplate standardsacross a range of subjects?Standards now concentrate on math andreading. The incentive this creates fordistorting the curriculum has beenwidely discussed; many people areconcerned about cutting back on socialstudies, music, and art. We must reflecton whether to extend standards to otherdisciplines to keep the curriculum broad.

How can we measure gains in student achievement?We now test students at a single point intime to establish the effectiveness ofschools. But that test actually measuresall a student knows, including learninggenerated in early childhood, out ofschool, or even in different schools. Toachieve true test-based accountabilityfor schools, we need to measure the


* Indicates a statistically significant difference from 1990 to 2004.Source: Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress analyzed by Educational Testing Service.

FIGURE 1. Percentile Distributions of NAEP Reading Scores by Age and Racial/Ethnic Group, 1990 and 2004

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effectiveness of what a student learnedwhile in that school in addition to whatthe student knows in total.

Even if we achieve commonality incurriculum and performance standards,these questions will remain. We shouldask ourselves, Do we want a commonversion of the current operating model,or do we want to work more on themodel?

Teachers have seen the locus of powermove up the governmental hierarchyover the past few decades. Educators at

all levels should stay tuned and usetheir on-the-ground experience andjudgment to determine what is good forstudents—and for educational equity—as we consider whether national stan-dards are to be or not to be.

ReferencesBarton, P. E. (2009). National education stan-

dards: Getting beneath the surface.Princeton, NJ: Educational TestingService, Policy Information Center. Available: www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICNATEDSTAND.pdf

Beatty, A. (2008). Common standards forK–12 education? Considering the evidence.Washington, DC: National AcademyPress.

Lewin, T. (2008, March 13). Report urgeschanges in teaching math. The New YorkTimes. Available: www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/education/14math.html

Paul E. Barton is an education writerand consultant and Senior Associate inthe Policy Information Center at Educa-tional Testing Service; [email protected].

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Yong Zhao

National standards would take U.S. education furtherin the wrong direction without achieving the desiredoutcomes. The assumption that common standards

will raise American students’ achievement on internationaltests and thus enable the United States to compete globallyand close its internal achievement gaps fuels the drive towardstandards. But there is no evidence that common standardswill accomplish this.

The United States is one of a small number of countriesthat does not have a national curriculum or standards.Judging from students’ performance on international tests,countries with a decentralized curriculum do not necessarilyperform worse than those with a national curriculum: Manynations with national standards perform much worse than theUnited States.

China is a well-known example of how establishing anational curriculum does not necessarily reduce achievementgaps. Despite years of a highly nationalized system and ahomogeneous culture, China still sees significant gaps in testscores among students in different regions.

As a result of NCLB, all U.S. states have developed statestandards and assessments; some have adopted common stan-dards in core academic areas. But there is no clear evidencethat these efforts have either significantly improved studentachievement overall or narrowed achievement gaps.

The negative consequences of national standards are welldocumented. Common standards lead to distortion of thepurpose of schooling and deprive students of a real education.

Governments inevitably use high-stakes testing to enforce standards.Such testing forces teachers to focuson what is tested and spend less timeon what is not. The focus ofcurriculum gets narrowed to a fewsubjects, and students wind up with adepressed education experienceoverall.

National standards stifle creativityand reduce diversity. To be creative isto be different, to deviate from the norm—but common stan-dards demand a uniform way of thinking, learning, anddemonstrating one’s learning. Standardized testing rewardsthose who conform and penalizes those who deviate.

Those who happen to do well on a particular assessmentare often considered successful, whereas those who do lesswell are labeled “at-risk,” regardless of other strengths. Astudent who may be extremely talented in art but cannot passthe reading test in the time required, for instance, is deemedinadequate. A student who arrives at school without the skillsand knowledge her classmates have is forced to fix “deficien-cies” instead of developing strengths. As a result, talents aresuppressed and wither. Once a standard is established, itbecomes a uniform measure that’s used to include or excludepeople.

Yong Zhao is Director of the U.S.-China Center for Researchon Educational Excellence at Michigan State University, EastLansing; [email protected].



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