Friday, July 23, 2010

National Standards

As someone who's been calling for national standards for 30 years, I'm nothing but pleased to see that more than half the states have signed on. The incentive of money helped a lot, but more important than that, the standards are pretty good, solid, consistent, and fairly rigorous, without the "created by a committee of monkeys" feel that a lot of state standards have. For the first time ever, I'm working on a proposal for a series of books based on the Common Core Standards--the first of many, I suspect.

2 comments:

Elizabeth said...

Been following this and not sure what to think. Have you seen an actual list? Is CA on it yet?
Here in Mass. the concern is that the Core is lower than what we have in place, and that this was an Obama/Patrick deal. On the teacher side, the main concern I've heard to date is that they will be forced to deal with two sets of standardized tests/standards because no one is talking about getting rid of the local version. Confusion, mostly.

KAZ said...

I'm working with them now. Of course they're just ELA and Math, but from what I see, they're quite sane. They require higher level reading than most states. Of course, no one knows how this will shake out, because states are allowed to keep a certain percentage of their own standards. It will take some time to become truly national. I believe CA is still thinking about it. To be fair, they have the best standards I've seen (not that it does them much good). I'm sure teachers are confused; I think everyone is.