COURTESY OF CHRIS MINNICH
THE
CORE
work on the project together?
The standards, in reading and
in math, would be developed by
the nation’s foremost experts, the
students of Kentucky would be
able to compare their academic
performance to their peers in
other states, and Holliday would
save money. The more he thought
about it, the more the idea appealed to him. A year later, Kentucky would be the first state to
adopt the Common Core.
The idea of creating a common
set of educational standards wasn’t
new. For decades, officials have
bemoaned the fact that it’s possible for a fourth-grader who lives
in Arkansas to be considered proficient in math — only to be told
he’s failing when he moves across
the border to Missouri. This inconsistency makes it hard to compare
student performance across the
country. It also illustrates just how
fuzzy states’ measures of proficiency can be. Duncan often points out
that the No Child Left Behind Act,
the decade-old law that tied school
performance to federal funding,
let states set their own, often unimpressive, expectations. Over the
last 50 years, federal officials, advocates and governors have tried
to create national standards in fits
HUFFINGTON
02.02.14
and starts (the Clinton administration’s Goals 2000 project is one
notable example), but each fizzled.
Yet somehow the Common Core
didn’t lose steam. The idea had
lately come up again various education circles, memorably in a November 2007 CCSSO meeting in
Columbus, Ohio. As the group’s
president, Chris Minnich, recalled,
“States were saying, ‘we’re being
compared against each other and
if we have lower expectations in
our states, that doesn’t help us.’
Chiefs said, ‘No state should have
lower expectations than another.’”
And like Kentucky, several states
were facing a mandatory update to
their learning standards. One chief
raised the idea of working on them
“States
were saying,
‘we’re being
compared
against each
other and if
we have lower
expectations
in our states,
that doesn’t
help us,’”
said CCSSO
President
Chris Minnich
(pictured)
of initial
discussions
about
Common
Core.