A single standard for schools

Education experts have long advocated the creation of a single national school achievement standard for teaching students core subjects like math and English to replace the national patchwork of differing state standards.

Opponents from two sides, however, have combined to crush the idea of a federal uniform national achievement standard that could be used to prompt improvement in lagging schools and states. State officials have been afraid that a national standard would reveal their low-achieving schools and students and an under-educated workforce. And reactionary conservatives have objected to a federal mandate over local school systems.

An ironic path to reform

Yet an ironic response to President George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program, which stumbled on widely varied state standards, has transformed the dynamics of the opposition. Governors and states' top education officials became alarmed at how their states used the absence of a uniform national standard to dumb down their own state achievement tests to avoid federal funding penalties for failing to meet academic achievement goals.

In Tennessee, for example, 87 percent of students scored at or above the state's proficiency level in math in 2005, yet only 21 percent scored as proficient on the federal math test for their grade levels.

Such gaps --and the impact of low student achievement on states' ability to compete globally for new plants and jobs -- led governors and state officials themselves to acknowledge the need for a stronger, uniform national standards. They convened a panel of educators last year to develop a national K-12 achievement standard for math and English. The landmark, state-driven result, unveiled and proposed publicly last Wednesday, is now on the table, and states are already signing on to use it.

Other states have started

Kentucky, using a draft of the new standard, last month became the first state to adopt it. It pledged to train teachers to it this summer and start teaching to the standard next fall. Leaders in North Carolina, Florida, Illinois, Idaho, Michigan and elsewhere have begun work to introduce the standard, according to the National Governors Association.

Well they should. The frightening decline of American K-12 education, regularly charted on international rankings for decades, continues to show the miserably mediocre achievement levels of American students relative to students in other rapidly rising nations in math, science and reading skills.

Recent analyses by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of more than 30 highly developed countries, confirm the substantial slippage of America educational achievement against peer nations. Students across Europe and the technologically advanced Asian countries generally outperform American students in math, science and literacy.

The United States, for instance, ranks 22nd in science. Korea now has a 98 percent high school graduation rate, far better than the 70 percent rate in the United States. Among OECD countries, the only countries with lower high school graduation rates than the U.S. are Turkey, Mexico, Spain and New Zealand.

Lagging learning in the United States is already eroding the nation's global economic competitiveness. It threatens a substantial decline in jobs, wages and prospective quality of life for the rising generations of young people whose schools let them cruise through without learning very much.

A springboard for more

This nation can't afford to let that continue. Indeed, the new uniform national standards for math and English should be just the beginning of a coherent, broad-based plan for improvement. The same array of educational organizations that the nation's governors used to develop the first two standards of achievement should move quickly toward standards for the sciences and social studies.

There will, of course, be some grumbling, and some states may still resist. Alaska and Texas are the only states that declined to participate in drafting the national standards, and they did so only on parochial grounds. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, for example, said he thinks only Texans should decide what Texas children need. By contrast, Massachusetts, which had recently developed perhaps the nation's most advanced achievement standards, may stick with its own, more rigorous model.

Tennessee must join

The new standard, to be sure, should not interfere with more vigorous education models. Its purpose is to fix a national minimum at a high enough level to assure educational integrity and strong achievement. It does not, however, fix a specific curriculum. Rather, it defines the conceptual goals for the curriculum to be taught each year, with the goal of building a continuous foundation of knowledge for successive years of learning in math and English.

Public comment will be accepted on the standard though April 2. Final versions of the standards for math and English are to be published later in the spring.

With myriad state and national organizations and the Obama administration behind the standards, they should gain national acceptance and a broad commitment to improved K-12 education. If this happens -- and there's no reason to think it will not -- it would generate a groundswell in education reform, and full state-to-state transparency on educational achievement, at last. That can't happen too soon. We urge this state's leaders to put Tennessee in the vanguard.