Kim's Blog

National Standards May Re-Shape Education—and Publishing

As a business owner I’m always looking to the future, wondering how certain events will affect my company. Right now I’m particularly interested in the Common Core State Standards Initiative. This initiative, powered by the state governments, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governor’s Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center), is researching and developing what they hope will be high quality educational standards to be used nationally.

These standards will be correlated to match with international standards so the U.S. can begin to truly benchmark our progress against other nations.  The CCSSO and the NGA Center believe establishing strong national standards can help our students be better prepared to complete not only with each other, but the rest of the world. By receiving an education driven by the K-12 standards, American students will hopefully be better prepared for the next step, whether that’s college or the workforce.

The question remains as to once the standards are developed whether every state will adopt them or work to align them to the standards they already have in place. But with a strong presence from the individual states in the development, it’s likely that adoption or alignment will be widespread. Already 48 states have signed on to collaborate in this manner.

It’s going to be interesting to see what this shift from individualized state standards to national standards will mean for educational publishing. I wasn’t in business when the state standards were introduced for the first time but I wonder why we didn’t first move to national standards and then on to state standards. This will make many changes for the educational publishing community and less confusion regarding specific state standards that sometimes leave us scratching our heads. The one thing we can look forward to, however, is that this movement will put a new emphasis on quality. Similarly to publishing before state standards were introduced, the publishing cycle may stretch back out some and allow us to have the time needed to create a textbook utilizing the best resources. With fewer individual materials to develop, more time, money and quality can be put into a cohesive national text—something we can all agree is a long-term benefit for learning.