ShareThisHand it to the states. All but two of them saw that their K-12 math and English standards could maybe do with some possible upgrading, and so they got together and worked out some improvements they could either adopt or not.
They finished the process, have been preparing for the most part to embrace the results after some weeks of public comment, and guess what? Here comes President Obama saying he will be happy to make sure all states get on board or else. No fooling around, folks. No federalism here. No freedom from Big Brother. You will have to snap to or just maybe risk losing your Title I education funds.
It's incredible, at least to some of us, how Washington just won't leave well enough alone, how our masters from on high feel they have to dictate what people are already doing without their interference. To get around constitutional restraints, these busybody bumblers cleverly, nastily, unjustly threaten to deny you money they have been dishing out, like parents withholding an allowance from potentially recalcitrant children.
But more of that later. Let's look at these proposed, new national standards, which are something short of an indisputable good but do seem to have considerable merit. There's the fact that, as of now, a high school degree can mean the graduate has climbed academic mountains in some states but has laid low in the valley in others.
It's those undemanding states that are worrisome. Don't doubt that some have really lousy, inadequate standards, and some young people consequently suffer in multitudinous ways and perhaps for the rest of their lives.
The other side of it, critics tell us, is that "one size does not fit all." For instance, it's pointed out, the new standards would have children master certain math concepts at a younger age than will be possible for some. What's so wrong with putting that learning off until later? A libertarian critique is that choosing one curriculum for all or most public schools crowds out other curricula that might be more intellectually enabling or in a variety of ways more suitable for certain students. Why not allow for more innovation?
A case in point appears to be high-achieving Massachusetts. Implementing these standards, one observer says, means others would have to be "dumbed down." An official in Texas, which along with Alaska, did not participate in the project, says his state's standards are already mostly parallel to those that are recommended, but that Texas simply wants its freedom to figure out curricula.
Understand as well that implementing the new standards is not free or doable in a minute. Some states, it is noted, will have to undergo a massive retraining of teachers, which will be expensive and time-consuming.
Federal interference, it is argued, is one way the standards of some states got to be so low in the first place. President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law (which for a long time seemed to me a good thing) enforces penalties when schools don't perform up to a level determined by state-determined tests. To avoid the penalties, the tests were made easy to the point of meaninglessness, it's said.
Obama's plan appears to be to assess penalties based on the new standards, which is to say, states could be inhibited from deciding the experiment maybe hasn't worked, or to emphasize liberal arts perhaps more than the new standards would permit, or decide to exceed those standards in particular ways or to adjust them to special needs.
The thing is, most of the states are marching in the right direction on their own, but can turn one way or the other as becomes obviously necessary to make they don't tumble off a cliff. Point a financial gun at their heads and maneuverability becomes more limited and diving off cliffs more likely.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
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