National Control of Ideas
Lindsey Burke and Jennifer Marshall make the case against a common national curriculum, arguing that standardization is more likely to result in uniform mediocrity than in academic excellence.
According to Burke and Marshall, having common standards not only won’t increase student learning, national standards will tend to lower standards and distract schools and communities from real reform.
Some states do have higher standards than others. But the same pressures that drive down state standards would likely plague national standards — and if national standards were defined down, they would undercut states with higher standards, such as Massachusetts. This would let the goal of uniformity trump the pursuit of excellence.
But the problem with national standards isn’t only that it won’t lead to improved student achievement. As Burke and Marshall have argued before, creating common core standards and a national curriculum will be most successful at removing control of education from parents and local community members and handing it over to the federal government.
Centralized standard-setting would force parents and other taxpayers to relinquish one of their most powerful tools for school improvement: control of the academic content, standards, and testing through their state and local policymakers. Moreover, it is unclear that national standards would establish a target of excellence rather than standardization, a uniform tendency toward mediocrity and information that is more useful to bureaucrats who distribute funding than it is to parents who are seeking to direct their children’s education.
Moreover, a national criterion-referenced test will inevitably lead to a national curriculum—a further misalignment of means and ends in education intended to equip self-governing citizens for liberty, and not a prospect most Americans would embrace.
Many states have argued that a one-size-fits all approach to education is not good for students and communities. Burke and Marshall agree and add that:
“National standards are unlikely to make public schools accountable to families; rather, they are more likely to make schools responsive to Washington, D.C.
In short, they rightly argue:
National standards wouldn’t improve academic achievement. They would merely strengthen federal control over education.
The Founding Fathers believed an educated populace was crucial for the success of American democracy. A good example: Some delegates to the Constitutional Convention temporarily left the proceedings to go vote for the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 which, among other things, provided public land for schools. But federal involvement in setting curriculum standards is a very different thing.
As Burke and Marshall note:
When President Jimmy Carter was intrigued by a national test proposed by Senator Claiborne Pell (D–RI) in 1977, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano warned that “[a]ny set of test questions that the federal government prescribed should surely be suspect as a first step toward a national curriculum…. In its most extreme form, national control of curriculum is a form of national control of ideas.
