Over on his Education Week blog, Rick Hess senses that the “broad but shallow coalition” of national curriculum standards true-believers and folks who just like the idea of a common academic metric might be fracturing.  The cause: The Albert Shanker Institute’s national curriculum manifesto released last month, as well as lingering concern about impending national tests. Suddenly – and seemingly against the wishes of Common Core leaders – the national standards push is starting to appear much less ”voluntary” and much more micromanaging than advertised. 

I hope that Hess is right that alarm is spreading over the oozingly expanding national-standards blob, but I disagree with how he seems to characterize what’s happening. Hess appears to see these developments, especially the Shanker manifesto, as overreaching by just some of the more zealous nationalizers, much to the consternation of the main Common Core architects and advocates.  But as I have pointed out before, if you reach into the bowels of what would-be nationalizers have written, as well as the logic behind national standards, it is hard to see this as anything but planned.

At the very least, the main advocates haven’t wanted standards adoption to be truly voluntary, by which I mean states are neither rewarded nor punished for adopting or bypassing the standards. The Obama administration intentionally and openly coerced adoption with Race to the Top, for one thing, without eliciting any loud opposition from  Common Core creators. But the administration was really just doing what the Common Core-leading National Governors Association, Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, Inc., called for back in 2008. As stated on page 7 of their publication Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring Students Receive a World-class Education:

The federal government can play an enabling role as states engage in the critical but challenging work of international benchmarking. First, federal policymakers should offer funds to help underwrite the cost for states to take the five action steps described above [including ”adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts.”] At the same time, policymakers should boost federal research and development (R&D) investments to provide state leaders with more and better information about international best practices, and should help states develop streamlined assessment strategies that facilitate cost-effective international comparisons of student performance.

As states reach important milestones on the way toward building internationally competitive education systems, the federal government should offer a range of tiered incentives to make the next stage of the journey easier, including increased flexibility in the use of federal funds and in meeting federal educational requirements and providing more resources to implement world-class educational best practices.

If you have federal “enabling” and ”incentives” you cease to have truly voluntary state adoption – or movement to the “next stage” – of curriculum standards. And that is exactly what the core supporters of Common Core have wanted. 

But aren’t standards just, well, standards, not curricula?

This is largely semantics. True, you can pinpoint what you want children to learn and when they should learn it without identifying how that goal should be reached. But just by defining the goal you are driving curricula, stating what must be taught.  Indeed, there would be no point to the standards if the intention weren’t in some way to affect curricula – what is actually taught in the schools.

Of course, there is another part to this: the two federally funded national tests currently under development, which Hess is hearing some in Washington would like to see become just one test. But whether we have a federally backed testing monopoly or duopoly ultimately won’t matter: For the tests to have meaning they will have to include concrete content, and assuming performance on those tests will impact how much federal money states and districts get – which appears to be what the Obama administration wants, and is the only thing that makes sense for people who back federal “accountability” – you now have a de facto required, federal curriculum.

I hope Hess is correct and the Common Core coalition is fracturing. I am dubious, though, that any major fissures are being riven by a faction of zealots that has just gone too far. Based on both the evidence and logic, going too far has been the widely held goal for several years.

What do you do when you’re asked your opinion about how to implement something you don’t like? Do you use the opportunity to say why you think implementation will fail, and how to minimize the damage, even if doing so might make you look like a collaborator? Or do you say nothing and just let bad stuff happen?

A couple of months ago, I was presented with that dilemma by the people at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute – you might have seen me discuss them once or twice – who were putting together a report on how to govern national standards and tests. They asked me, along with several other people who’d thought long and hard about national standards, to send them answers to several questions to help inform their thinking. Today, Fordham is releasing that report, and I have just a few notes about it.

First, you will see me quoted twice in the paper, and from those quotes you could get the impression that I’ve gone all Vichy on national standards. I don’t think Fordham authors Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli intended to do that, nor do the context of the quotes necessarily support that conclusion, but one could get that impression nonetheless. Fortunately, Fordham kindly posted my entire questionnaire – as well as those of several other respondents – on the report’s Web page, and you can go there for my complete thoughts. If you don’t want to do that, though, I’ll summarize (stop me if you’ve heard this before): As long as government runs and funds schools rather than giving parents control of education money and educators full freedom, standards-and-accountability regimes, no matter how strong they start off, will ultimately be rendered meaningless by politics.

My second note is that the overall report is aggravating because it is impossible to concretely discuss the governance of standards that almost no one knows about, and accountability systems that don’t exist. The Fordham authors acknowledge this problem, but acknowledging it doesn’t make it any less enervating. It also highlights that we’ve skipped a critical, much more fundamental debate: Even if you think centralized standards are a good idea – and almost everything we know about markets, competition, and innovation says they aren’t – how do you, really,  keep politics from gutting standards and accountability? It’s a debate we needed to have long before states started to adopt national standards, largely in the pursuit of federal dough.

All that said, there is one, small part of the report that I find quite satisfying. A few months ago, Fordham President Chester Finn called people like me and Jay Greene “paranoid” for arguing that national standards would be hollowed out by politics. Well, in the report, while it is not explicitly identified as such, you will find what I am going to take as an apology (not to mention a welcome admission):

How will this Common Core effort be governed over the long term?…This issue might seem esoteric, almost philosophical in light of the staggering amount of work to be done right now to make the standards real and the assessments viable. But we find it essential—not just for the long-term health of the enterprise, but also to allay immediate concerns that these standards might be co-opted by any of the many factions that want to impose their dubious ideas on American education. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to worry about this possibility [italics added]…

No, you don’t.

You might recall several weeks back when Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called people like me “paranoid” for seeing federal money driving states to adopt national education standards as cause for serious concern that (a) the feds will take over schools’ curricula, and (b) the new federal curriculum will be taken over by potent special interests like teachers’ unions. (You know, the kinds of special interests that can get Democrats to give them $10 billion by cutting food stamps.) Well, in last week’s Education Gadfly, Fordham published a piece by Eugenia Kemble, president of the union-dedicated Albert Shanker Institute, saying that national standards demand a national curriculum.

This interesting little happening – Fordham publishing a piece by a union stalwart arguing that a national curriculum must go with national standards – didn’t go unnoticed by fellow paranoiac Greg Forster, who is now in a blog dispute with Kemble. It makes for telling reading, especially Kemble’s rejoinder. It features an all-too-casual use of the charged term “balkanization” to seemingly describe anything not centralized, and utterly fails to mention federal funding when implying that the common standards push is state led and voluntary.

Unfortunately, Kemble mainly just sidesteps Forster’s primary point: Fordham has provided yet more evidence that national standards funded by the feds will lead to  a national curriculum that could very well be controlled by special interests. Heck, Fordham is in league with at least one component of the teachers’ unions here, which is fine if they share the same goals. All Forster is trying to emphasize is that it is ridiculous to call people crazy when they simply point out what so much evidence seems to show.