When states began voluntarily adopting Common Core State Standards six years ago, one of the biggest incentives was the promise of a high, consistent baseline for student achievement. With agreed-upon metrics for what students should reasonably know and be able to do at each grade level, parents and teachers are better able to measure how well their children, and their children’s schools, are doing.
Last year, most states passed an important milestone toward that goal by administering high-quality student assessments aligned to rigorous, comparable education standards. For the first time, parents and educators had an accurate measure of how well their kids were developing the skills necessary to succeed at higher levels of learning. Unfortunately, before reaching that point, some policymakers began to waffle. Confronted with the false narrative that any kind of conformity among states equated to a loss of local control, states including Georgia bought into the misguided notion they could avoid controversy by abandoning common assessments, namely PARCC and Smarter Balanced, in favor of independent state-developed tests.
States that took this go-it-alone approach quickly learned that abandoning these high-quality assessments to appease opponents turned into a costly and chaotic exercise that has: 1) created uncertainty for schools, 2) produced assessments that very likely will prove inferior to the consortia exams, and 3) weakened states’ ability to compare results to others across the country.
While some onlookers might offer an “oh well” reaction to the underhanded efforts to disrupt states’ work to achieve greater comparability across schools, for some student groups, namely military families, these attacks do real damage. Military families move an average of six to nine times during a child’s K-12 career. With each move comes a real question of whether that student will struggle to keep up or have to sit through material they already learned, based on what was expected of them at their previous school.
In 2013, Gen. Ray Odierno, Army Chief of Staff, made clear good schools must be a priority. “I’m worried about military kids in their states,” he said. “If [elected officials] want to keep the military in their communities, they better start paying attention to the schools that are outside and inside our installations. Because as we evaluate and as we make decisions on future force structure, that will be one of the criteria.”
Whether they come from a civilian or military family, all children deserve to be held to high, consistent academic expectations that fully prepare them to succeed after high school. Educators deserve a system that allows them to collaborate with other great teachers and to share best practices. Parents deserve a framework that allows them to evaluate how well their schools are serving their children compared to others across the country.
For those reasons, leaders should resist the temptation to “go it alone.” Like never before, states have achieved a high level of comparability and rigor that transcends state and district lines. It would be a shame to go back on that progress.
About the Author
