http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/education/11educ.html

A panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents proposed a uniform set of academic standards on Wednesday, laying out their vision for what all the nation’s public
school children should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.

The new proposals could transform American education, replacing the patchwork of standards ranging from mediocre to world-class that have
been written by local educators in every state.

Under the proposed standards for English, for example, fifth graders would be expected to explain the differences between drama and prose
stories, and to identify elements of drama like characters, dialogue
and stage directions. Seventh graders would study, among other math
concepts, proportional relationships, operations with rational numbers
and solutions for linear equations.

The new standards are likely to touch off a vast effort to rewrite textbooks, train teachers and produce appropriate tests, if a critical
mass of states adopts them in coming months, as seems likely. But there
could be opposition in some states, like Massachusetts, which already
has high standards that advocates may want to keep.

“I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a former
assistant secretary of education who has been an advocate for national
standards for nearly two decades. “Now we have the possibility that for
the first time, states could come together around new standards and
high school graduation requirements that are ambitious and coherent.
This is a big deal.”

In recent years, many states moved in the opposite direction, lowering standards to make it easier for students to pass tests and for schools
to avoid penalties under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law.

After educators, business executives and others criticized the corrosive impact of a race to the bottom, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers set the common-standards
initiative in motion last year. They convened panels of English and
math experts from the College Board and A.C.T., and from Achieve Inc., a group with years of experience working to upgrade graduation standards.

Alaska and Texas are the only states that declined to participate in the standards-writing effort. In keeping his state out, Gov. Rick Perry argued that only Texans should decide what children there learn.

The Obama administration quickly endorsed the effort. Under the Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, in which states
are competing for a share of $4 billion in school improvement money,
states can earn 40 points of the possible 500 for participating in the
common effort and adopting the new standards. Under current law, there
is no penalty for states that choose not to participate.

The standards are open for public comment through April 2, before final versions are published later in the spring.

Kentucky, working with a draft, last month became the first state to formally adopt the standards. The state said it would train teachers to
the standards this summer and begin teaching them this fall. Officials
in Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina and other states
have begun laying the groundwork for adoption, said Dane Linn, the
education division director at the National Governors Association.

The adoption process varies greatly from state to state. In some, the state schools superintendent has considerable power to move forward in
as little as three months. But other states, including California, have
complicated procedures, involving the state board of education and
other bodies that could prolong the process for a year or more, Mr.
Linn said.

Educators and officials involved in the writing process pointed to what they considered to be strengths in the proposed standards, including
that they are concise.

“Many states have too many expectations in their academic standards that force teachers to cover too much in a superficial way,” said Gene
Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School
Officers. “We said: ‘Let’s keep these very understandable and at a
number that is manageable. Let’s not put on teachers more requirements
than they can deliver.’ ”

Another improvement over current state benchmarks, people involved in the initiative said, is that the proposed standards are what educators
call vertically aligned, meaning that material students are to learn in
early years builds a foundation for what is to come in the next grade.

“Students are asked to do progressively more challenging things, and although that may sound obvious, it’s a real breakthrough,” said
Michael Cohen, an Education Department official in the Clinton administration who is president of Achieve.

But not everyone was so enthusiastic.

“We’re not at all satisfied,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a Boston nonprofit group that helped Massachusetts revise its state
benchmarks in the 1990s. “Ours in Massachusetts are much higher, so why
should we adopt these?” Mr. Stergios also criticized the three-week
public comment period.

“When was the last time you saw a national effort that was rammed through in three weeks?” he asked.

The United States Chamber of Commerce, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Association of State Boards of Education, and a string of
other business and education groups immediately endorsed the draft
standards. The Council of the Great City Schools,
which represents the nation’s largest urban public school systems,
called the standards “high quality grade-by-grade standards that the
nation can be proud of.”

They outline concepts to be learned, but do not lay down a specific curriculum.

In English, for instance, they do not prescribe individual works of literature, but instead suggest texts illustrating the quality and
complexity of student reading appropriate for various grades. The
middle school list includes “Little Women”
and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,”
as well as works of nonfiction like “Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the
Underground Railroad,” by Ann Petry. The 11th-grade nonfiction list
includes Henry David Thoreau’s
“Walden”
and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Because the standards cover only English and math, their writers did not include proposals related to evolution, a cause of controversy in
some states, or to any other specific science concepts.

Since the late 1980s, many educators and policy makers have considered the current system of state standards a weak link in American
education. Because the standards vary so widely, standardized tests
keyed to them are not comparable from state to state, nor to national
tests. Eighty-seven percent of Tennessee students scored at or above
the proficiency level in math on state tests in 2005, for instance,
while 21 percent did so on the federal math test.

Efforts to draft voluntary national standards during the first Bush and Clinton administrations foundered after conservatives attacked them as
federal meddling in classroom teaching. Because of that tumultuous
history, leaders of the latest effort have defended its state-led
nature, despite frequent endorsements by the Obama administration.

Also, they enlisted considerable help from education groups, including the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Council of
Teachers of Mathematics and others.

Writers who participated said they had sought to build on the best of what is already in some states’ standards, while clarifying and
simplifying.

“We tried to clean house a bit, keeping only what is most important and most critical,” said Susan Pimentel, a consultant in New Hampshire who
helped write the English standards.