Editorial: Setting school standards

The goal of bringing public education up to a unified, internationally competitive level is a good one. The state in which a child lives should not affect the education he or she receives. National standards should ensure that all high school graduates are properly equipped to enter the workforce or college. The United States is one of the few industrialized nations that does not have a national curriculum, and at the same time, American children are falling behind many of their international peers — especially in math and science. Standards could help streamline, elevate and unify the country’s common educational goals.

As important as standards are to raising the United States’ educational aspirations, they are only half the battle. Many schools are unable to meet these standards because of insufficient resources, crowded classes and teachers with poor credentials. It is hardly progress if the nation’s poorest schools are held up to a new set of standards but still find it impossible to meet them. Moreover, it is unclear how these standards would be incorporated into existing testing under the No Child Left Behind law. If struggling schools are punished under the law for their inability to meet these high benchmarks, then the standards will only exacerbate the problem. Imposing standards on these schools is a futile exercise unless additional support is provided at the state or federal level in concert with this initiative.

As the NGA and CCSSO begin to draft grade-by-grade standards in the coming year, they should consider shifting away from their plan to only set standards in language arts and math: It would be a major oversight to exclude science. Such standards would be relatively easy to set and more straightforward than the inherently vague standards for language arts. Given that the United States is already slipping behind in science, national standards are necessary to help boost our ability to compete in growing technological industries.

The University, as a leader in education, should not stand on the sidelines. Though the Common Core Initiative is a promising development, it cannot be useful or comprehensive in its current imagined form. With a strong contingent of recent alumni participating in the Teach For America program, as well as many alumni and professors who are key players in public education, Princeton is well situated to shape this discussion.