Of all the reforms that legislators are on the verge of passing to enhance its Race to the Top application, the most consequential also has been the least discussed.

California is about to commit to junk its decade-old, much ballyhooed system of K-12 academic standards by Aug. 2. Doing so will the require writing new assessments and curriculum frameworks and adopting new textbooks over the next few years– at a cost that easily run in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

What’s amazing is not the state’s consideration of the Obama administration’s push for “common core” standards. The concept of internationally benchmarked academic standards to which students in all states can be measured and compared is certainly sound.

But, in the hopes of scoring extra points in the Race to the Top contest the state is saying it will adopt common core standards as article of faith, essentially sight unseen.

California’s standards aren’t perfect; there appear to be too many of them in many grades in many subjects. But they are tough. Skeptics have raised legitimate worries that common core standards may be flabby, especially in math.

The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers are leading the common core effort, with help from a slew of experts and organizations, including Achieve. The first pass on  grade by grade standards is due out next month.

So far, there has been only a draft of career and college readiness standards for high school graduates. And it has been sharply criticized by Palo Alto engineer Ze’ev Wurman, who helped develop California’s math standards, and Bill Evers of the Hoover Institution, among others, for leaving out large portions of  the Algebra II curriculum – as required for admission to UC and CSU, California’s four-year state colleges.

The debate mixes politics and philosophy. Many states’ academic standards lack rigor – and, in some  cases, intentionally have been made weaker, in order to escape penalties under No Child Left Behind. Designing standards to meet the average state would undermine California’s standards.

But there is also the argument that the majority of high school graduates, who don’t go on to a four-year college, shouldn’t be held to a college prep curriculum. In  testifying on common core,  Stanford emeritus professor of education Michael Kirst said that  the committee creating the draft standards presented no evidence to support its  assumption that students heading to college and those going straight to the workplace need the same set of math skills.

Fear of dumbed-down curriculum

Wurman argues that a dumbed-down curriculum would send more students unprepared for college, particularly in critically needed majors of science, math and engineering. As Wurman wrote, “Which is better for higher education institutions and the United States? Placing mathematically unqualified freshmen in credit courses in colleges and universities, or strengthening high school coursework to prepare more mathematically qualified freshmen for them? In a more rational world, the question wouldn’t even be asked.”

Under Race to the Top, California has the option of banding together with other states with rigorous standards, like Massachusetts, to create their own standards, instead of adopting the national set.

That might happen. But either option doesn’t leave much time or latitude. The  state must adopt 85 percent of the standards of whichever group it chooses, and, under the compromise bill before the Legislature, must do so by Aug. 2. A 21-member state commission, half of whose members will be teachers, will review the standards before sending them for an up or down vote by the state Board of Education.

California, however, will have a big say in the final common core standards. Six of the 25 reviewers are Californians:  three Stanford professors (Linda Darling-Hammond and Kenji Hakuta of the School of Education, and emeritus math professor James Milgram, architect and staunch defender of California’s math standards); Longbeach Unified Superintendent Christopher Steinhauser; WestEd’s director of assessment and standards Stanley Rabinowitz; and David Pearson, dean of UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.

By John Fensterwald on December 22nd, 2009