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National K-12 Standards

Let me be clear – the national standards on their own will not dramatically improve American education. We need a much deeper, a more radical reform.  However, common standards in core subjects will make education a little less expensive, and just a little less confused. Developing 50 different math standards is clearly absurd. In addition, it will help clear the confusion created by No Child Left Behind law, which measures “adequate yearly progress” for each school and each state, but states started at different points. If you started with rigorous standards, you cannot progress as fast if at all. If you started with low standards, of course you can show much progress (sort of line Chinese GDP growth rates – so high because China was so very low before it started to grow).

Now let’s see what these standards are going to be – more like “21 century skills” or more like traditional content and skills based standards. It does not matter much, because all curriculum is still arbitrary.