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?
Ed Week’s David Hoff broke a significant piece of news over at NCLB: Act II the other day. At the National Governors Association’s meeting last weekend members approved a policy statement that could lead to national education standards:
The statement hasn’t been released to the public yet. But governors told me that it advocates putting state leaders in charge of a national effort to establish a “common core” of standards defining what students should know. The statement dovetails with the report released in December by the NGA, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve Inc., a group of governors and business leaders. That report called for a process of benchmarking the standards of high-achieving countries to determine what content they consider most important.
Hoff sees the stament as newsworthy because “it adds momentum to the move toward national standards” and notes it “sailed through the NGA without any controversy or significant debate.” Fordham’s Flypaper thinks Hoff’s exclusive would have been front-page news were it not for the economy. “Think about it,” says Mike Petrilli, “the governors are open to throwing out their own standards—the heart of their education accountability systems—in favor of frameworks that would have reach from coast to coast. This is a big deal!”
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