Thought it would never happen? It’s not freezing over yet, but the temperature is falling fast.
Representatives from 37 states are meeting in Chicago today, Edweek reports, for “what organizers hope will be a first, concrete step toward common guidelines in mathematics and English-language arts.” Michele McNeil has the scoop:
The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers—the Washington-based groups that are co-sponsoring the meeting—want to build a prototype of high school graduation standards by summer, and grade-by-grade academic standards in math and language arts by the end of the year. The undertaking would start with rigorous math and language arts standards that are aligned with college- and career-ready expectations and made available for states to adopt voluntarily. Following the meeting states ready to support common standards are to be asked to put their commitment in writing within weeks.
“I’ve been in education for more than 35 years, and we’ve had major meetings that have called for progress before, but I see [this] meeting as the first step to really taking aggressive action,” Eric Smith, Florida’s education commissioner tells McNeil.
Brrr. Is it cold in here? Or is it just me?
Sounds promising to me.
The conventional wisdom is that we’ll never get agreement on a common curriculum, but I wonder. Today I was teaching my seventh graders about the myriad abuses of the Catholic Church in the Late Middle Ages. To put it mildly, it was not flattering to the church. Yet teaching about church corruption is mandated by the California state history standards. Somehow, in this state with a lot of Catholics, we managed to ratify statewide standards that probably don’t please a lot of Catholics. Reason, it seems, prevailed.
Nonsense. Even Catholic schools teach about “the myriad abuses of the Catholic Church in the Late Middle Ages.” I know. I teach in one.
Good to hear. One of my colleagues, a Catholic school alum, said he’d never heard about the dark chapters in the Church’s history.
Read Monty (Fair Test) Neill’s fraudulent comment under the article. He goes on and on about how “absurd” the entire proposal of national standrads is – in his opinion, anyway.
I can’t think of anything that would better prevent Core Knowledge from being available to more families than to have national standards.
Every anti-knowledge, anti-fact, process-obsessed, project-centered fun-and-games fuzzy progressivist education group in the country would be demanding the kinds of programs that have already devastated our schools.
There have been some 50 attempts at statewide standards; most have led to miserable conclusions. It’s a complete mystery why anyone in their right mind would think that just one more attempt, but this time national in scope with all the fuzzies pulling out all the stops on lobbying, could possibly be successful.
I’d like to ask Ben F a question: Do school-children today learn anything *positive* about the Church? My impression as a public librarian is that students are exposed *only* to the “dark chapters” in American and Christian history. If my impression is correct, then Reason has not prevailed: Political Correctness has. A common national curriculum (which would include the lucent as well as the dark chapters in the history of Western civilization) would be great if we could wipe out PC first.