Roy's Blog on Schools: Who Will Lead on Standards?

A few weeks ago the Casey Journalism Center asked if I would contribute my top three education issues that journalists should watch for in the 2008 presidential election. Readers of this blog won't be surprised at my choices - or that I listed America's deplorably low education standards as issue number one.

But I was surprised to see that both of the other two organizations who were queried also listed standards first. Here's what I said:

Raising Our Low Education Standards. After all the talk of No Child Left Behind pressuring schools to improve, it might seem odd to say American education standards are too low. But in June, the U.S. Department of Education revealed that half the states have set fourth-grade reading benchmarks so low that they fall beneath even the most basic level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. A recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development pegged America's low education standards as one of the biggest threats to the U.S. economy. And according to a poll released in July, three-quarters of Americans favor some kind of national effort to raise academic standards.

Just think about that for a moment. Experts agree this is the biggest education problem candidates should be addressing. Recent research shows many states have set standards too low. Respected international organizations say our economy will be in trouble if we don't raise standards. And nearly three quarters of Americans say they favor a national effort to raise education standards.

It seems like all of the ingredients are there for presidential hopefuls to run with this issue, right? Yet less than a handful of candidates have talked honestly about the standards problem or proposed solutions to deal with it.

Let's be clear about why - It all comes down to politics, specifically some of the states where important early primaries take place. Iowa and New Hampshire are strong local control states, and candidates who need those primary votes are hesitant to talk about anything that might challenge local values. So most candidates are very careful to tiptoe around standards, either ignoring the problem or talking about it in very abstract terms.

Now I've been in politics a long time, and I know better than to think that candidates will propose anything that might jeopardize their chances with voters in states like Iowa and New Hampshire. But I have come to believe that there is a way to demonstrate genuine leadership on this issue by proposing a solution that is sensitive to political realities but bold enough to get the job done.

What if a candidate proposed working with a group of states to create model standards for the other states to adopt on a voluntary basis, with some strong incentives for doing so? That way, the rigorous American standards we need would be coming from the states themselves and not "from the feds." Here is how it might work:

A President works with a group of states (say 15) to draft a set of common standards, based on work already underway in some states, that would serve as a voluntary model for others;