“Michigan’s MEAP test could undergo a radical change by the 2014-15 school year — becoming an online assessment given in schools across the country.”

“Michigan adopted the common core standards in June, a requirement to be part of the Smarter Balances Assessment Consortium, a group of states creating the new standardized test.”

This of course is based on the Race to the Top Assessment Program. “Creation of the new test is contingent upon $350 million in U.S. Department of Education grants expected to be handed out in September. Part of the Race to the Top money was set aside for two grants to develop assessments for common core standards.”

“Faster test results could make helping kids easier” — as if that were the main problem identified by teachers, students and parents. At least for lead poisoned families living in Detroit, this represents a violent aloofness of immense proportion.

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RTTT is the "Carrot That Feels Like a Stick," says Mike Petrilli (of all people). He "can’t help but feel remorse for the death of federalism."

As I prepare for a talk at DePaul University tomorrow, I’m racing (ha!) to review the assessment program of Race to the Top. After having vented yesterday, several things stand out as politically significant in the assessment competition.

It is key to understand that the content of Race to the Top is bribery. While in the past the main criticism from various quarters was that much of NCLB’s testing requirements were “unfunded mandates;” today they are funded, but in an even more coercive way. Those who do the bidding of Obama, Duncan and a host of venture philanthropists, will receive tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. This itself is significant, for as I’ve noted before, bribery as a method signifies illegitimacy: “The use of the public treasury to bribe educators is an open admission that the path being imposed by the ruling elite cannot be justified” — that is, it is against prevailing public opinion. Despite all the talk about putting children first, kids do not want more testing, they are not craving to have their entire academic experience converted to numbers and letters in some federal database (as RTTT appears to aim to create), nor are they demanding teachers who only spend a few weeks preparing to enter the classroom, high on a mission inspired by the White Man’s Burden. Nor are children and youth narrowly interested in education for a career. So, as is often the case, things are not what they seem. The irrationality of the project requires that its political functions be explored. Eligibility requirements for receiving the competitive grants are a good place to begin.

An Analysis of Select Requirements

To be eligable for the Comprehensive Assessment System (the first assessment competition), the Executive Summary states:

Eligible applicants are consortia of States. To be eligible to receive an award under this category, an eligible applicant must—1. Include a minimum of 15 States, of which at least 5 States must be governing States (as defined in the NIA); 2. Identify in its application a proposed project management partner and provide an assurance that the proposed project management partner is not partnered with any other eligible applicant applying for an award under this category; and; 3. Submit assurances from each State in the consortium that, to remain in the consortium, the State will adopt a common set of college- and career-ready standards…

It will be important to thoroughly explore the degree to which this arrangement has precedent, but there are, it appears, some significant breaks with past practice. Unlike national associations like the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) — which is nonetheless playing an important role in creating national standards — RTTT requires placing some states as “governing” over others and require states in the consortia to sign “assurances” of compliance with the governing state and executive demands at the federal level to receive funding. Whereas CCSSO and possibly other associations are framed as advocacy organizations, this arrangement appears to create new governance structures. It appears to structure a new form of political inequality among states as well.

So what of these new governance structures? First, it is important to take seriously the use of the word consortium. Similar to the increasingly used concept of partnership, consortium is typically understood as “an association, typically of several business companies.” The social and political arrangement in which this makes sense is typically understood as belonging to the private realm of private enterprise, or that of “civil society” in the form of a professional association or “non-governmental agency” — as distinct from the state. But here we have the federal apparatus, under the direction of an executive, and not the law making body, forming through the use of bribes governing structures that do not obviously conform to the U.S. constitution or even state constitutions. What are we to make of a group of states forming a governing alliance that controls curricular content and standards for assessment whether teachers are teaching and students are learning that content, under the direction of executive bodies of the federal government? Will such alliances compete with each other? Will there be a Confederate consortium?

In the Federal Register notice, we find this interesting option:

Application Requirements: An eligible applicant’s application must—1. Indicate, consistent with 34 CFR 75.128, whether—(a) One member of the consortium is applying for a grant on behalf of the consortium; or (b) The consortium has established itself as a separate eligible legal entity and is applying for a grant on its own behalf; 2. Be signed by—(a) If one member of the consortium is applying for a grant on behalf of the consortium, the Governor, the State’s chief school officer, and, if applicable, the president of the State board of education from that State; or (b) If the consortium has established itself as a separate eligible legal entity and is applying for a grant on its own behalf, a representative of the consortium.

It is completely unclear, albeit on its face significant, what it means to allow for states to form a consortium that “has established itself as a separate eligible legal entity.” Such as a private corporation or non-for-profit institution?

Second, what might be most significant about this arrangement is not that it violates states rights (presumably the out for the Obama administration here is that Duncan is not actually forcing any state to apply for these grants) but rather that it restructures executive authority by creating “partnerships” between associations of states that relate as single entities to federal bodies, where these consortia appear to be de-linked both from federal and state law making bodies.

A related criteria for winning the competition is the role given to public institutions of higher education (IHEs). The Summary explains:

The Department gives eligible applicants competitive preference points based on the extent to which they have promoted collaboration and alignment between member States’ public elementary and secondary education systems and their public IHEs…Eligible applicants addressing this priority must provide, for each IHE or IHE system, a letter of intent that—(a) Commits the IHE or IHE system to participate with the consortium in the design and development of the consortium’s final high school summative assessments in mathematics and English language arts in order to ensure that the assessments measure college readiness; (b) Commits the IHE or IHE system to implement policies, once the final high school summative assessments are implemented, that exempt from remedial courses and place into credit-bearing college courses any student who meets the consortium-adopted achievement standard (as defined in the NIA) for each assessment and any other placement requirement established by the IHE or IHE system; and (c) Is signed by the State’s higher education executive officer (if the State has one) and the president or head of each participating IHE or IHE system.

This arrangement appears to have the effect of brining state public education systems under a governing apparatus of consortia of states — neither at the state level nor the federal level — that, in turn, interacts with the federal department of education. Of course, there is much to say about this — the implication of mandating the elimination of remedial courses for example — but that is for another time.

Another feature that suggests significant restructuring of executive power is this requirement stipulated under Consortium Governance. It notes that the “terms and conditions of the Memoranda of Understanding or other binding agreements executed by each member State” must include the “State’s commitment to and plan for identifying any existing barriers in State law, statute, regulation, or policy to implementing the proposed assessment system and to addressing any such barriers prior to full implementation of the summative assessment components of the system.”

Like Race to the Top requirements that bribe states into rewriting their laws — the most notable examples being the removal of caps on charter schools and rules limiting the use of test data for teacher evaluation purposes — this places executive bodies in a quasi-law making role. Along with venture philanthropy and other monopolies, governors and some legislatures are demanding changes to state law to increase state chances for winning Race to the Top funds. While a key point here is the clear focus on emasculating teachers unions and the spreading of massive disinformation about “putting kids first”, the point here is that this structure creates a new governing mechanism, neither at the level of state, nor clearly at the federal level; in some ways, it is not clear that the consortia to be formed are fully public in nature (e.g., a consortium that “established itself as a separate eligible legal entity”). It is important to understand that these changes are enabled by the ARRA, the result of the crimes of Wall Street (while some banks are “too big to fail” public institutions of historic proportion, such as public schools and universities, are being forced to fail).

Another clue that suggests limited public status for these governing structures is the manner in which RTTT insists on technical standards that are, generally speaking, open source or cross platform, while maintaining test secrecy. This ensures the public continues to be blocked from access to test content. Again the notice in the Federal Register is more helpful. It states:

In addition, we are requiring that eligible applicants receiving awards under either category in this competition develop assessment items and produce student data in a manner that is consistent with standards for interoperability, and that they make all assessment content (i.e., assessments and assessment items) developed with funds from this competition freely available to States, technology platform providers, or others that request it for purposes of administering assessments, consistent with States’ needs and with consortium or State requirements for test or item security.

Suggesting that public dollars are again being used to develop technology latter utilized by private entities, the notice reads:

We believe that these requirements will ensure that assessment content developed with funds from this competition is widely available, including to States that are not part of consortia receiving funds under this competition as well as to commercial organizations wishing to further develop, extend, and incorporate the content into assessment products intended for State use. Moreover, we believe that making assessment content freely available will spur innovation in assessment technology and enable technology providers to compete for States’ business on the basis of their developing efficient, effective, economical, and innovative assessment platforms.

It does not appear than that the issue is simply one of state’s rights and the death of federalism. Rather, it appears the very nature and scope of executive power is changing, and working to further distance governance from the public and its will.

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Well, let’s examine the first paragraph of the Executive Summary (since that is how far I got before I had to say something before my brain exploded):

Authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), the Race to the Top Assessment Program provides funding to consortia of States to develop assessments that are valid, support and inform instruction, provide accurate information about what students know and can do, and measure student achievement against standards designed to ensure that all students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace. These assessments are intended to play a critical role in educational systems; provide administrators, educators, parents, and students with the data and information needed to continuously improve teaching and learning; and help meet the President’s goal of restoring, by 2020, the nation’s position as the world leader in college graduates.

Wow! If you’re not struck by the incompetence, read it again. OK, wow!

First, validity of these new assessments is presented as a criteria that is somehow separate from providing “accurate information about what students know and can do”. Would you consider it possible to have a valid assessment that cannot provide information about what students know and can do in some domain (assuming for a moment developing such assessments is a straightforward and problem-free endeavor)?

More troubling is this gem: “measure student achievement against standards designed to ensure that all students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace.” Measurement is not the same as comparison. And the phrase “measure student achievement against” is inept and awkward. Of course one might counter that the sentence means to convey that college and career standards should be used to measure student achievement prior to college, or that these standards should be used to validate measures of achievement. But such re-renderings do little to help. By way of some spell developed by Voldemort, this measurement spiral will ensure “all students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace”. Can standards ensure things like this?

Oh, it’s actually quite easy, like, when, uh, the standard measure of weight is used to ensure everyone loses weight! If only obese youth had access to more bathroom scales!

And wouldn’t it be great if schools prepared everyone for college and the workplace? That won’t be a challenge, because all colleges and degree programs are essentially the same, and we all work (those of us who have the will to get a job in this free market utopia) in “the workplace.” I think it is well established, using scientifically based methods, that all workplaces are essentially the same and require the same skills. The psychological literature is bursting with studies demonstrating how easily skills transfer from one domain to the next…that’s why CEOs have proven to be such effective educators.

And, I’m really happy that the Obama administration wants to provide parents with “data and information needed to continuously improve teaching”. Hell, since they, and many teachers, will be out of work, they might as well do something for their country…

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One of the underlying tensions of this reform revolves around central tenets of the U.S. system of governance: federalism. The question posed by the framers of the constitution was how to secure national interest without tyranny; how to share power without diluting it; how to avoid civil war among those being “federated.” Underlying the current efforts is a dramatic increase in the role and power of the federal government, especially the power unelected executive branches now exert over state and local education systems. Sometimes explicit, other times implicit, the debate is rendered as one of defending the constitutional status quo — states rights, local control, etc. — or the need to move beyond partisan politics, that this is “for the children” and is not in any way altering who is in control. In pushing for national standards, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan reportedly told state Governors: “some people may claim that a commonly created test is a threat to state control — but let’s remember who is in charge. You are. You will create these tests. You will drive the process. You will call the shots.”

So where should one stand? The experience of history yields the following conclusion: neither the past system of “local control” (and its role in defending crimes of segregation and inequalities of wealth) nor the present drive for “innovaation” in the form of “national standards,” “pay-for-performance,” “alternative certification,” and “high quality assessments” along, with a certain kind of “choice,” will serve the interests of the people as a whole.

In contending with how to move forward, what stands to take, it is important to understand that the drive for broad, universal education in the United States was very much influenced by African Americans and workers generally, beginning after the Civil War. The system that emerged was the result of a fight, one that has been continuously waged, between factions and classes over the form and function of eduation. Universal education under their auspices required no admissions tests, no fees or tuition, no “agreement” to accept draconian test-prep methods and humiliation as a basis for enrollment, no rejection of students with special needs. Most important from the point of view of the present is that this model did not adopt the notion of competition as its underlying principal. It was driven by the demand of enlightened humanity, against slavery and all forms of oppression. It was premised on the conclusion that education is a basic human right, with society responsible to ensure its universal provision as a condition for individuals and collectives to fulfill their social responsibility to society. This broad education was a key element in the vision for the advance of humanity that emerged with the end of legal slavery in the United States.

Among conditions of forced illiteracy, education activists of that time and on to the civil rights movement of the 20th century demanded an education far beyond “literacy” and “work readiness” (the limits now imposed by todays “leaders” so that they can profit from global competition). Demands for culture, political decision making and philosophy stood behind practical efforts to raise the educational levels of entire communities in record time following the civil war (whose progress was blocked from further advance by the state-organized racist gangs such as the KKK and the post-Civil War arrangements of legal segregation).

This lesson of history is that if education is to serve the public interest — is to serve the society — the people themselves must set the standards designed to govern the content and form public education is to take. That Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is outrightly bribing states and local school districts into accepting the corporate agenda for schooling by awarding federal funds to only those who comply with this agenda is itself a frank admission that the direction he is driving education is against the public will and the public interest. It is illegitimate as bribery is not a modern basis for securing the consent.

Parents, teachers, families and entire communities reject the vision handed down to them by these “reformers” that says the highest aspiration served by education is that of getting a job or being “ready” for “college” — itself now reduced to more job training. Such a standards smacks of arrangements before the Civil War, where extensive education was reserved only for the rich, with the masses receiving only that which the rich deemed necessary for them to function as workers and slaves.

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What would have been unimaginable even ten years ago is now taking place: the U.S. educational system is poised to break with one of its politically unique and defining features: state control over public education.

Because education is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, article X applies: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

It is clear from the above comments, and many others like them, that there is consciousness that these standards (whatever name is pragmatically assigned) are part and parcel of larger changes to governing arrangements more generally. Supporters of the “common standards” have belittled objections citing article X. The compromise of state’s rights during the founding of the U.S. is now seen as a block by the most powerful reformers. Below I offer a heuristic for contending with the push for national standards.

The Nature and Function of Standards

Among other things, standards in any sphere of social life play an important role in establishing, maintaining or even expanding the power of an authority, its interests, and outlook. To determine standards is a claim to have authority over a sphere of social life. Struggles over standards are often expressions of broader political rivalries, either between sections of a ruling class and/or between the social classes. Disputes over standards are one means by which conflicting claims (of classes or factions) can be sorted out. Finally, the act of establishing a standard not only serves to empower the actor, it also stands as an effort by that actor to legitimate future claims to govern over the domain of which the standard is applied. Finally, the failure to establish a standard, the failure to secure compliance with a standard, signifies failure of the authority the standard represents.

The Public Good

If nothing else, the notion of public good is that of the common interest, and is defined through contrast with narrow and sectarian interests. Bourgeois political thinkers in the West understood that capitalism gave rise to factions in society because of the inevitability of inequality as a result of the private pursuit of property. While rejecting the principal of socialized property that is the logical extension of the public good, bourgeois thinkers nonetheless understood that factions unchecked lead to unstable forms of government and ultimately civil war. But they rejected tyranny of one faction over all others as a resolution to this problem. Thus was established in the U.S. a system of power sharing between states that make up the union and stood as means for forming the national political will.

Standards Set by Narrow Political Factions Cannot Serve the Public Good

The standard setting now taking place necessarily reflects the aims, objectives, and outlook of those who set them, and serves their interests. The public and rank and file educators, and their concerns, have been excluded from setting these standards. How can the public good be served if the people who are the object of the standards are not key agents of their creation?

What aims do the standards being proposed reflect? Global competition is often given as a justification, and it should be readily evident that this is not an aim derived from the concrete conditions or desires of the majority in the United States but rather it is an aim derived from the preoccupation of a tiny minority of financial and industrial interests. Workers in the United States have in no way benefited from competing with other workers in other countries, as their material and social conditions continue to deteriorate while the biggest financial, commercial and industrial giants make record profits — often at the expense of workers whom are deemed to “out compete” “America”.

Far from “offering the best possible education” to all Americans, such an approach lowers the level of education and is even worse than job training. It is an outlook that uses education to place venture capital at the center and the only legitimate arbiter of the progress of public schools. Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Ford Foundation and all the Wall Street players do not have the right to decide for the public the future of education!

Without serious discussion by the public and among the public of the aim and purpose of education, no meaningful standards that serve the public good can be developed or adjudicated.

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* * *

When ASCD asked me to write on the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers’ (CCSSO) draft English/Language Arts core standards, I agreed with delight—but also with a less pleasant sense of duty. I imagine very few people enjoy perusing pregovernmental documents, after all. However, I felt that as a language arts teacher at the gateway of American secondary education, I had better bite the bullet and read the document. I was not prepared to find a text that would make me nod, laugh, frown, think, and—literally—weep. Perhaps these varied responses are the best reflection of my primary concern about the standards: the massive unevenness of the document itself.

First, let me say what the document is not. It is not a core curriculum, reading list, or jingoistic treatise on appropriate K–12 language arts content. In fact, only four sentences in, the document explicitly states that states, districts, and parents (parents! How about that?) will be making “many important decisions about curriculum.” No doubt, given the high-energy tussle over national standards, the need at least to pay lip-service to the republican nature of American schooling was uppermost in the authors’ minds.

[...]

The document does its finest work when it outlines standards for the treatment and generation of information, argument, and evidence. I counted 37 standards that explicitly addressed these topics, or about 65 percent of the standards. Reading them, I couldn’t help but think of the fear-driven rancor surrounding the current health care reform efforts here in the United States. It might be different today if our schools emphasized rhetorical analysis and logic. There is nothing more democratic than equipping our students with the tools necessary to participate in civil, informed debate.

Why do I bring up democracy? Because a lack of democracy is also the overwhelming central flaw in the proposed standards. Given our national image as a democratic beacon, this problem cannot be overstated.

Narrow Definition of Readiness

Let’s begin with the dominating rhetoric of the document: that the standards are geared specifically for “college and career readiness.” Sample sources for the standards, listed in the back of the document, are apparently aligned to this vision. Some interesting percentages out of those approximately 70 citations:

• Corporations or corporate-related partnerships: 18, or 26 percent
• College preparatory companies: 13, or 19 percent
• Peer-reviewed educational research: 4, or 0.06 percent

I think this speaks for itself. The sources are not only morally questionable and not truly evidence-based, but it also does not appear to be a democratic sampling of either the communicative needs of our diverse workforce or those of various institutions of higher learning.

Another nondemocratic idea in these standards is that the highest aspiration of all students in our country should be either higher education or a job in business. I use the term “business” advisedly. A close look at the standards’ language reveals that despite the repeated phrase “career-ready,” the burden of career sources, explanations, and examples embedded in the standards text is overwhelmingly based on a hierarchical business model. The communicative needs of alternative careers that are either not business-based or do not require a college degree—farming, art of all kinds, skilled labor, nonprofit social work, or even teaching—are not similarly addressed. We can only presume that the CCSSO does not think these careers are worth addressing.

We have an even larger problem with the standards if their implicit educational reasoning is true. Let’s assume that we do live in a society that requires everyone to have a college degree before they can start a truly meaningful career. If so, then it is impossible to have a set of language standards that define both college and career readiness, since students entering college can assume that they still have time to learn the language skills needed for a career. They wouldn’t possess those skills already, as the doubled-up standards would (and often do) presuppose—for example, in the insistence on mastery of discipline-specific vocabulary.

Missing Stakeholders

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), as reported in its president’s general letter to members last week, was not invited to help write the Common Core Language Arts Standards. In addition to the obvious inanity of this decision, I believe that the document shows a glaring absence of input from experienced writers. For example, it breaks one of its own standards for strong argument by being peppered with undefined adjectives such as “rich,” “sophisticated,” “exceptional,” and “resonant.” Who decides what these terms mean, and to what works they may be applied? The CCSSO should either avoid this type of language altogether, or it should pay much closer attention to creating and anchoring specific definitions of quality.

And the final technical blow: missing referents, capitalization errors, omitted punctuation, and murky, run-on sentences. That’s right: basic errors of mechanics in a document intended to become the highest standard of language in the United States.

In Defense of Holistic Education

Yet all these problems pale in comparison with the standards’ failure to recognize that in a true democracy, the primary aim of education is holistic. An excerpt of Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which is included in the document with no apparent sense of irony, states how the writer “is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service . . . for her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written—it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis.”

We are supposed to be helping our young people become both aware and expressive of their individuality, their general well-being, their talents and joys, their ethical code, their desire for lifelong learning, their sense of place, their local and global communities, and their responsibilities as members of the human race. These are what ensure that students are healthy, functioning members of our society. They are certainly my ultimate goals as a teacher, with language—particularly aesthetic, creative, and reflective language—as the vehicle. Yet beyond cursory mentions of citizenship, there are no sentiments like these—not a drop—in the current draft of the standards. Narrative, reflective, and creative communication receive relatively little attention in the standards, if they are included at all. All these things are included, notably, in other international standards of language, such as those of Finland—one of the highest-performing nations on the planet.

Dina Strasser is a middle school English/language arts teacher in upstate New York and blogs at The Line.

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This “director of education” actually argues that students require tough national standards because there is a “gap between how U.S. students perform [on standardized tests] relative to those in high-performing countries”, and therefore it is “no longer tolerable for the United States to depend on the top 10 percent to carry this economy.”

Excuse me? So those who produce and distribute real wealth, those who provide services such as healthcare and education — the majority — “do not contribute to the economy”? And, those who don’t “excel” at answering irrelevant questions found on some guessing game are the cause of the country’s economic crisis? (Example possible analogy for the upcoming SAT: National Governor’s Association is to Bill Gates as Sycophant is to…) Does this “educator” mean to say that those who produced and benefited from the recent trillion dollar bailout have been “carrying this economy” — only if one admits they’re carrying it into the dumpster! It is precisely this “top 10 percent” who live off the toil of the vast majority of workers in the U.S. and worldwide, who steal from the public treasury in the name of “stability.”

But it gets better. “We have both a moral and an economic responsibility to ensure that all students have an opportunity to take advantage of what we traditionally call those high-wage, high-skill jobs.” Right. Monopoly capitalism is all about ensuring everyone has a high paying job. I have no doubts that, when the States “voluntarily” adopt “common standards” for math and language arts, the economic laws governing capitalism, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, will cease to operate. Everyone will be able to take advantage of those plentiful high paying jobs, thanks to national standards!

But hold on. Further on in the interview, we learn of a different concern: “And the other thing is that it’s just not defensible to spend as much money as we are on the development of standards and assessments — times 50. So if we can leverage resources from state to state — for example, on student assessments — we can stop spending the approximately $700 million we are spending collectively and reach an economy of scale that is not obtainable in one state alone.” So, assessment is really super important, but we don’t want to spend money on it, so as with the rest of education, let’s try to cheapen it, all the while championing high quality education for all.

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Today represents a milestone, though, for a potential breakthrough that could have major implications for higher education. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association will release common standards for core curriculums in mathematics and reading and writing that, because of a confluence of events, could create a set of widely embraced national (but not federal) standards for what high school students need to know to be “college ready” or to have the skills to enter the work force.

So, what is the difference between “Federal” and “National” Standards? I suggest that federal is used here to point to administrative oversight and power, and as such, “federal standards” as a phrase is avoided because it points to worries that federal education policy increasingly violates state rights, as the provision and administration of education is given, due to its absence in the U.S. constitution, as a state right by article X .

Supporters of the “common standards” have belittled objections citing article X. This suggests how uncomfortable “reformers” are with current constitutional arrangements — i.e., that the compromise of state’s rights during the founding of the U.S. is now seen as a key block by the most powerful reformers. It also suggests what “National Standards” means in terms of political justification. That is, “national” here refers to an interest, in the same way that “national security” refers to an interest that is not limited to an administrative structure (federal, state or local) but rather to the promotion and protection of an interest. Examination of the interests of those driving the “core standards” and the general absence of “real” educators in the formation of the standards (despite efforts to make the process appear “inclusive”) is key to understanding the emphasis on “national” vs. “federal” in discussions of “core standards.” It also points to the role of standard-setting in altering governing arrangements.

As a starting point for thinking more about the political significance of “National Standards”, I offer the following from Witold Kula’s 1986 book Measures and Men:

The right to determine measures is an attribute of authority in all advanced societies. It is the prerogative of the ruler to make measures mandatory and to retain the custody of the standards […] The controlling authority, moreover, seeks to unify all measures within its territory and claim the right to punish metrological transgressions. (p. 18)

He further notes that the “frequent struggles centered about metrological competence of the constituted power are but a manifestation of the rivalry between various organs of authority aspiring to control measures in order to bolster their standing,” emphasizing that “attempts to control measures [standards] have been an ever-present element in the struggle for power between interested representatives of the privileged class” (18-19).

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[...]

Today represents a milestone, though, for a potential breakthrough that could have major implications for higher education. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association will release common standards for core curriculums in mathematics and reading and writing that, because of a confluence of events, could create a set of widely embraced national (but not federal) standards for what high school students need to know to be “college ready” or to have the skills to enter the work force.

[...]

“This is the first time the K-12 people have stood up and said, ‘College readiness is our goal,’ ” says Kati Haycock, president of Education Trust, which advocates for low-income students. “Higher ed people ought not to underestimate how big a deal this is.”

[...]

That effort has received a big push from another source: the Obama administration. Although direct involvement by the federal government could be a death knell for many school-based initiatives, given the pushback from local school boards against involvement in curriculum setting, the administration has lent its weight to the project with its favored tool: money.

As part of the economic stimulus legislation that Congress enacted last winter, Education Secretary Arne Duncan agreed to set aside $350 million (as part of the administration’s Race to the Top fund) for states to develop new tests and other measures tied to the Common Standards initiative. More fundamentally, the rules for states to participate in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund (which is designed to stimulate innovation among high schools) require that states join the Common Standards effort to tap into the federal money.

The tight timeline for distributing the federal stimulus money has sped up the process for implementing the core standards initiative. The second draft of the standards (which update earlier drafts for mathematics and reading/writing and were developed by panels of educators, including some university professors) will, upon their release today, be reviewed by panels quickly convened by the American Council on Education based on advice from the Modern Language Association and the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences.

From the Comments:

Interestingly, the board that developed the draft national standards in mathematics, for example, includes only one person who has had any K-12 classroom experience (not current), and is heavy with people from Achieve, ACT and the College Board. They wrote the draft on a very tight timeline with almost no input from outside their echo chamber. I suspect that the “standards” will not have much relevance to the actual intellectual requirements of entry-level college study, but that they will provide a bonanza opportunity for the testing companies.

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