MR. BRENDAN GREELEYFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show" connecting your community with the world. I'm Brendan Greeley sitting in for Kojo. A responsible democracy teaches its citizens what they need to know, but a responsible democracy also leaves power to states where it can. And what a citizen needs to know is hard to agree on between any two citizens. This year, more than 30 American states began adopting what is called a common core of education standards, a list of what your children and my children will need to know. It may save money. And depending on who you talk to, it'll either squash or encourage teacher innovation at the state level. Michael Cohen is in the studio with us. He is the president of Achieve, Inc., a non-profit education reform organization based here in Washington, D.C. Michael, welcome.

MR. MICHAEL COHENThank you, welcome, I'm glad to be here.

GREELEYSo first of all, if you're not an education wonk you probably don't know what happened last year. So walk us through the process of developing these standards and what inspired them in the first place.

COHENSure. Well, first of all, for more than a decade now, every state has developed a set of academic standards that define what students need to know and be able to do in each discipline. They each do that on their own. And not surprisingly, there are tremendous differences among the standards from state to state. Not because there's a different kind of math or English that students need in West Virginia versus Wyoming, just because each state does it on its own. There's been growing interest over a long period of time in seeing if there is a way to get common standards across the states. The federal government tried to do that a number of times during the Clinton administration. I was actually part of those efforts. They were resisted. They didn't work. The federal government is not the right actor to get this job done. About a year ago, 48 states came together under the leadership of the National Governor's Association and the Council of Chief States School Officers. Achieve was also part of this partnership. But those states came together to create a statewide effort to create standards that the states could then adopt if they found them to be high quality.

GREELEYWhat inspired that? I mean, somebody had to have launched the first e-mail that got all these states together.

COHENWell, there were a number of things that inspired that. One is the differences among states and what they expect of students are really indefensible in a global economy where students are competing against students in Singapore and Finland and Japan, et cetera. They're not competing against students just in the other states. Secondly, under No Child Left Behind, each state reports each year the percentage of students that were proficient on its own standards, but the federal government also has a national exam that it gives to a sample of students, kind of like a survey. And what we found were tremendous differences in some states between their percentage of students who were reported as proficient on the state test, say 80 percent, whereas only 30 percent of the students might have been proficient on the national assessment of education progress. And that raised a lot of questions about whether every state was setting standards that were as rigorous as they needed to be and were giving honest and accurate information to students, teachers and parents.

GREELEYAnd so the danger is that students can't compete with students with other states and then students of all the states can't compete with students of other countries?

COHENThat's correct. There's one other issue here that turned out to be important. Increasingly, states recognized that they needed to prepare all of their students to be able to enter and succeed in some kind of post secondary education or work force training, whether it's a four-year college or a two-year college or a technical training program, an apprenticeship program and they were not doing that. There was a big gap between what they expected of students and what students really needed to know to succeed in post secondary education. Once they began trying to close that expectations gap, they found that what you need to succeed in college in Virginia or in Maryland or in Washington state is pretty much the same thing. The rationale for each state having a different set of expectations simply began to evaporate.

GREELEYSo let's go through the process of actually getting together and creating this common set of expectations. It sounds a little bit like a Constitutional Convention.

COHENWell, maybe worse. What the Governor's Association and the Council Chief States School Officers did, essentially, was to form a -- number one, a team of writers, experts in English language arts and in mathematics. Some of those happen to be people who work for Achieve because that's an area we specialize in. But really a broad group of them from the disciplines, from curriculum specialists, from academia, who worked to craft a set of standards drawing on the best that states already had done so they weren't starting from scratch or ignoring the great work that states had done. They looked at evidence about what constitutes college and career readiness. What's the research tell us about what students need to know? And they looked at what -- at standards in high performing countries, in Singapore, in Japan, in Korea, in South Korea and other places like that where students routinely score much higher than U.S. students do on international tests, to see what their expectations were and how they structured their standards. And based on all of that evidence and lots of input, the writers, over time, developed a draft of standards. First, what students need to know by the end of high school and then kind of backwards, K-12 from there. There were several rounds of input from states, from curriculum specialists there, from a variety of folks in the education community. The last time they put it out for public input, there were about 9,000 comments that came in. So there's extensive involvement in this and, over time, the states came together, by and large, to agree that this was a set of standards that was worthy of adoption.

GREELEYWere there any specific characters in this convention? Was there a Sam Adams who brought it all together?

COHENNo. Actually, the genius of this was that this was really state led. It was a collective action of states that did it. The people who wrote the standards, who are terrific, were not out front. They were not leading this in the sense of, you know, having a pen quite visible. The idea was to get input from lots of sources and capture it and make that really quite a tremendous document.

GREELEYForty-eight states. Who declined?

COHENThe two states that didn't participate -- that chose not to participate from the outset were Alaska and Texas. They just didn't want to be a part of this from the beginning. Now, the states that did participate, promised to be part of this process to develop the standards, but they all had the right to decide at the end of the day whether these standards were ones that they should adopt or not. And so far, about 36 states have decided to adopt the standards.

GREELEYSandra Stotsky is a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. She's on the phone from Fayetteville, Arkansas. Sandra, now that we have this set of voluntary standards, how do they strike you?

MS. SANDRA STOTSKYThank you for inviting me. I have been rather critical, as Mike Cohen and many others know, of these standards from the very, very beginning. And part of the problem has been a civic perspective which I bring to this whole process. There's been almost complete non-transparency about the whole process or why the people who were doing the draft writing or reviewing, et cetera, were chosen. I happen to have been one of the people on the validation committee that also looked quite critically and analytically at these standards. But I don't know how much you want me to say about my own --the critiques that I have written and co-authored with a mathematician for the Pioneer Institute in Boston, which is where the -- where one can find four to five different reports analyzing the evolving drafts of these standards since their inception with what were called college career and readiness.

GREELEYWell, we're gonna put a link to those on the website at kojoshow.org. But, Sandra, first of all, we hope you say a lot. This should be a conversation, not a monologue.

STOTSKYRight.

GREELEYLet's tackle the problem of transparency first, before we get to what was actually in the standards. This is a classic problem of any convention. It was a problem with the Constitutional Convention as well, which is that there's a certain tension between releasing early results and causing an outcry too soon by making too much apparent too quickly. And the Constitutional Convention, in fact, was closed to the press.

STOTSKYBut one did know who was there.

GREELEYSo what...

STOTSKYStates did know why they were sending people or why the people who were there were there. There was some clarity about the major actors on that scene, but there was never any rationale given for why the three major groups that provided the personnel originally -- Achieve was one, College Board was another, A-C-T, ACT was another. These were groups that are known for assessment overall and they were not discipline-based groups, which one would have expected for the development of mathematic standards or even for the development of English language arts standards. So there was a problem from the beginning about the qualifications and the membership of these groups, never explained, never justified.

STOTSKYIt was done by these outside groups that Mike Cohen mentioned. The National Governor's Association and the Council for Chief States School Officers, neither of which respond directly to the voters, so they didn't have any particular obligation to let everyone know why they were choosing the people they chose and why these so called experts that they chose, most of whom had almost no experience writing state standards, were doing this. There were a lot of problems with transparency all along. And the drafts of the grade level standards, by the way, only two drafts ever came out. One was leaked in January and then the public comment draft came out in March. And the final draft that came out, which no longer could be revised, came out in June, but it was, in many ways, different from the public comment draft.

GREELEYSandra, let me jump in here. First of all, we are picking up the phone at 1-800-433-8850. But I want to make sure, before we get too far in the discussion of what was actually produced and certainly how it was produced, I want to get some precision in terms here because everybody who's listening is actually wondering how this is going to affect their children. So, so far as I understand, there's a distinction between a set of standards and a curriculum and an actual lesson plan. So help us understand what a standard is and what, I'll throw this to Michael, what this actually means in the classroom. How does a standard trickle to a teacher?

COHENSo the standards are basically the description of the outcomes you want from the education system, in terms of what students need to know and be able to do in each content area. The curriculum is the means of achieving those standards. It spells out in much more detail the content of what will be taught in each class that can vary from place to place. A lesson plan is even much more detailed, in that it lays out how the teacher's gonna go about teaching a particular unit or a particular part of the standards. All that was done here was create a description of expectations, what it is that's most essential for young people to know and be able to do in two subject areas as they leave high school.

GREELEYSandra, just to make sure we're all using words the same way, is this also how you understand a standard to operate?

STOTSKYFor the most part, except that what came out of the English language arts group, did not appear to be standards. Standards do frame a curriculum, that's why they're often imbedded in what is called a curriculum framework. They indicate the shape or the contours of a curriculum, not the specific curriculum used to get to the standard. But what happened with the English language arts so-called standards, particularly those called college and career readiness standards, is that they turned out to be mainly generic skills, which can apply at any level grade, 1 through 12, so they're not true standards.

GREELEYSo please go ahead.

COHENIf I can respond.

GREELEYActually, let me jump in. We're gonna come back in a second so that the distinctions between skills and standards -- and we also want to understand how this actually affects teachers, the ones that are coming up with the lesson plans based on these standards. You're listening to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show" at WAMU 88.5. I'm Brendan Greeley, sitting in for Kojo.

GREELEYWelcome back. I'm Brendan Greeley from The Economist, sitting in on "The Kojo Nnamdi Show." I'm talking with Michael Cohen and Sandra Stotsky about the Common Core Standards, a way of getting states to agree on just what it is children should know by each grade level, regardless of how they're taught. To understand a little better how these work, Michael, I'm wondering if you could read a sentence or two from what the expectations of the Common Core Standards are.

COHENI didn't actually bring a copy of the standards...

GREELEYThat's fine.

COHEN…with me. But let me give you an idea of what's...

STOTSKYI could give you one in English language art.

COHENI'm sure you can, Sandra.

GREELEYWe're going to come back to English because that's a very important question about sort of how English is being taught. But let's start with a more general framework of what the standards are expected to achieve.

COHENFirst of all, what the standards expect, for example, in reading is that students will develop a deep set of skills, have the ability to read and comprehend carefully the material that they read, both literature and informational text. Secondly, that they will be able to write arguments, write narratives, write a variety of different kinds of documents that are based on sources that they've read, interpret them accurately, apply evidence and logic and reason to make a point, to make an argument to an audience. That's pretty critical work that anyone ought to be able to do wherever they're heading.

STOTSKYRight. That's a very general and certainly laudable goal. Could I give you an example of one of the particular...

GREELEYPlease.

STOTSKY...College and Career Readiness Standards in the document?

GREELEYPlease.

STOTSKY"Analyze how and why individuals, events and ideas develop and interact over the course of the text."

GREELEYThat's pretty vague.

STOTSKYSee, that's -- exactly. It can apply to "The Three Little Pigs" in grade 1. It could apply to "Moby Dick" in grade 12. It's a generic kind of approach.

GREELEYWell, let me throw this back to Michael. How does this then -- if we have this generic approach that Sandra has described, how does this become a lesson plan?

COHENFirst of all, Sandra has listed one standard that is the combination of grade by grade standards in that area. The standards are very clear about the kinds of texts that students ought to be able to read, particularly the complexity of those texts. So it's not just any old text. It's texts that are appropriate at each grade level in terms of the kind of ideas and complexity that they contain.

STOTSKYThey're not in the standards, though.

COHENYou know, that sort of a fairly esoteric technical detail, as to whether they're in the standards or in the epenthesis. The point is, there's plenty of guidance provided to teachers and curriculum developers about the kind of material that students ought to read, both the kind of literature they ought to read, as well as the kind of informational texts that they ought to read.

GREELEYYou know, this is a tough subject to talk about because it's important to remember that we're talking about very abstract documents that have very sort of serious and real-world consequences...

STOTSKYRight.

GREELEY...with what it is that your children end up learning over the course of their primary education. We're picking up the phone at 1-800-433-8850. I'd love to hear from you if you've got school-aged children and you're wondering whether -- or how this will help them compete both nationally and internationally. And I'd love to hear from you if you're a teacher as well. We're going to go to Karim in Alexandria. Karim, you're a teacher?

KARIMI was a teacher. So you guys were asking about the difference standards and curriculum and lesson plans. Brendan, I think you asked that.

GREELEYYes.

KARIMI taught algebra in three different states. And I'm not really sure how it is for the humanities, but algebra is algebra, right? I mean, you calculate slope pretty much the same way. Maybe in the southern hemisphere it's different, but you calculate slope the same way. Now, the way it works, from a teacher's perspective, is the state likes the standard -- just to break things down for your listeners. So a state likes the standards and then the school districts get those standards and then they are tasked with buying materials, write textbooks. And so as a teacher, if you're a new teacher, you're overwhelmed. You've got cluster management, you've got, like, a real nuts and bolts stuff to deal with. You then turn to that textbook.

KARIMAnd so there is a real difference between -- I think, we have to differentiate between quality of content and quality of standards. Now, I'm not a teacher anymore and this is actually why I called in. I left teaching and I'm now the founder of Mathalicious. And what we do is we write math lessons for all middle school and algebra standards. Now, we think that core standards actually foster innovation. And the reason is simple. It's like Open Source. It takes serious resources to align your lessons to 50 different sets of standards. And the only ones who can afford to do that is the big textbook publishers who have little incentive to innovate, and talk to any 8th grader in the country, and they're suffering the effects of that.

KARIMAnd so what that means is we, as a company, can really only approach teachers. Because when a school district says to us, are you aligned to the state standards, we're like, well, we just don't have the resources to do that. Teachers don't necessarily care, right? If you're an algebra teacher, you know you have to teach slope. In Virginia, it's slope. In New York, it's slope. In Virginia, though, it's like A4. In New York, it's going to be called something else. Teachers don't necessarily care. Districts do. And what Common Core Standards can potentially do is sort of open up the playing field to people who are designing, you know, hopefully really innovative content and letting them compete with the Pearsons and the Prentice Halls and the Houghton Mifflin ones and the people who have kind of had the hegemony over, you know, textbook content forever, really.

GREELEYKarim, I think you passed over a really important point, which is the comparison between a Common Core Standard for education and Open Source development. Could you make that a little clearer?

KARIMSure. So it's -- look, Open Source -- I mean, you know, Open Source is basically, you know, the code and you can write a program around that, right? We've de facto or de jure, rather, I guess have Open Source standards. I mean, anybody can look at a state's standards and write a lesson around that. But where it becomes kind of de facto prohibitive is we can't write -- we can't write lessons for -- we can write a lesson, but it's going to take incredible resources for us to align those to 50-state standards plus one, plus the Common Core. And so in terms -- what I'm trying to get at is, in terms of the Open Source analogy, Common Core Standards are sort of Open Source and that they allow anyone to program, right, content -- quote/unquote "program content for classrooms." But then, they really give people cred to then have conversations with schools and school districts and states to say we're aligned to the standards you care about.

STOTSKYI would agree with what this speaker has raised as a value of common standards or national standards because that is really not the issue that we've been discussing, so far as I'm aware. The problem is, do we have first class internationally competitive national standards in this country? And that has been the critical issue from day one. There aren't many people who would disagree that we need both common science as well as math standards. But they should be competitive with the best standards out there, those of Singapore, Japan, Korea and so forth. And also, we had a few states that had some very good standards, but that is not what we ended up with at the high school level. And I think if anyone takes a look at what the high school math standards are in Common Core, their eyebrows should raise because all you have are six conceptual categories of unordered standards. They're not organized by course. They're not organized by grade level and there is no other country that would ever put out a document like that.

GREELEYSandra, I want to come back to this because I think that there's a fascinating element to this whole conversation that goes back to Sputnik, which is that these standards were deeply vested in them, not only because we were worried about children and we want to make sure that they learn, but we have that sort of a national identification with them. And I don't lose that and I want to come back to it. But Karim brought up a really interesting point, which was the aspect of innovation under the ages of a Common Core Standard. And I'd like to hear from both of you, starting with Sandra. Does his point ring true with you. Are we able to innovate more? Will teachers be able to innovate more under a Common Core Standard? Or as other arguments that I've read maintain, will a Common Core Standard squash state-based innovation? Sandra, why don't you go ahead and take this first?

STOTSKYI don't know that we have any evidence at this point to say that it will or will not foster innovation. There is a case to be made. And this was a part of having a federal form of government where you had 50 different state laboratories for education, in a sense. There's a case to be made for allowing the states to do the innovation and then for the states, of course, with the idea of local control, allowing local districts to do the innovations so that things wouldn't happen on such a huge, gigantic scale that you disrupted everything and you couldn't evaluate anything you were doing. So I'm not sure that having common standards fosters innovation or doesn't foster innovation. I don't think that's the strongest argument to be made for having national standards.

GREELEYWell, let's hold onto that argument for a second. Michael, you want to take that?

COHENYeah, several points. First of all, I think common standards certainly can foster innovation. And I think we heard from the previous caller a good argument for how, because it makes it easier for folks with innovative ideas to develop them with a much larger marketplace in mind than just one district or one state. So it's easier to do things at scale this way and to reach out to a larger market. Secondly, you know, national standards is how most of the world operates now, including the countries that outperform us. And to the contrary of what Sandra said, these standards are internationally benchmarked. They're internationally competitive.

COHENThey take the best of what the world has done and bring them to U.S. schools. And once that's in place, right, as we work on professional development, as we work to develop new curriculum materials and instructional materials and new teaching strategies, it will be easier to innovate because people can learn from each other across districts and across states.

GREELEYI want to try and keep this in the classroom as much as possible because this is a really difficult concept to grasp. We're going to go to Leah Luke. She's on the phone from Mauston, WI. She's a Spanish and English teacher at the Mauston High School and she's also Wisconsin's 2010 Teacher of the Year. Leah, have you started incorporating the new standards in your curriculum? Are you -- how are you responding to them given that you're going to have to actually adapt to them?

MS. LEAH LUKEWell, first of all, greetings from America's Dairyland, the beautiful state of Wisconsin.

GREELEYGreetings from...

LUKEThe sun is shining. The grass is green.

GREELEYGreetings from America's capitol, there, senators here and it's hot.

LUKEI'm no scholar or researcher, but rather I'm a practitioner and I'm a teacher in the field. And I can tell you and maybe speak a little bit about the practical side of this debate. I don't pretend to understand the politics behind much of what's going on in education outside of my own classroom. But I can tell you that in looking at the standards and in providing feedback to the draft of the standard, I think that they are very practical and user friendly. And in our district, we are moving forward on implementing and embracing the standards, in English and language arts specifically.

GREELEYSo walk us through the process that you would take from -- from moving from a standard to an actual lesson plan in your classroom.

LUKEWell, I don't know if the process is as dramatic as it's playing out because I can tell you what we've done so far in our district. We have a forward-thinking director of curriculum and instruction and an administrative team. And what they've done this summer is get together our K through 5 teachers and they've looked at the English language arts standards and they've taken a peek at what they align with in the curriculum already. And what they found is there are some gaps and they're going to meet those gaps. They're going to seal those gaps now with supplemental material. But I don't think it's as radical of a shift as what it's being made out to be.

LUKEI, myself, will be back in the English classroom this fall and I'll be teaching English 10. So I took a look at our curriculum and the lesson plans that I've taught before in English 10 and I found that we do a pretty good job of meeting the standards right now with just a few exceptions. So it'll be additions to my curriculum. It doesn't require a new teacher training, doesn't require a lot of effort. But it's -- just looking at these very user friendly standards and now applying them.

GREELEYYou're listening to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show" on WAMU 88.5. I'm Brendan Greeley from The Economist, sitting in for Kojo. We're talking about a Common Core Standard for national education. What we just heard from a practitioner in Wisconsin and, in fact, Wisconsin's teacher of the year, I will remind you all, is that this isn't that radical. Is it possible that the core standards might fly by and teachers won't notice?

STOTSKYCould I ask the teacher a question?

GREELEYPlease.

STOTSKYLeah, could you tell us how, at the high school level, which is where I have focused most of my concerns, how high school English teachers think they can create a coherent curriculum if over 50 percent of what they assign and teach about at the high school level, 9 through 12, will have to be informational reading.

COHENSandra, if I might interrupt for a second. That's just...

GREELEYWhoa, hold on...

COHEN...just an inaccurate reading of the standards, totally inaccurate.

GREELEY...she threw the question to the practitioner. Let's go to Leah.

COHENThen I want a shot.

GREELEYPlease.

LUKEOkay. I think that that's maybe not accurate and I'd have to check the percentages and I think that was perhaps more closer to 30 or 40 percent should be informational text at the high school level.

STOTSKYIt's 10 out of the 19 reading standards are informational. That's what the numbers are.

LUKEBut I think the beauty of these standards are, for one -- and this hits on the question that you're asking me, is that English and language arts is not the sole property of the English language arts teachers.

STOTSKYOh, right, right. That's a separate issue.

LUKEAnd so we also have the literacy standards for social studies, history and science.

STOTSKYRight, right.

LUKEAnd I think that's where a lot of that addition of informational text will happen. As adults, we do an awful lot of reading of non-fiction informational text that you're speaking of and I don't think we've paid as much attention, we haven't focused as much on that type of reading as we have literature. And so I think this was a good thing to keep us globally competitive and to prepare kids for career and to be career and college ready.

COHENLeah has it exactly right. There is much more attention to reading and understanding informational text in these standards than has previously been the case. But that is not what we're asking English language arts teachers to teach. They are still expected to teach literature, period, as they always have. The other kinds of informational text in science, in history, in career and vocational courses are the province of the teachers in those courses. That's not what we're asking English language arts teachers to teach. And, Sandra, you're just really getting this one wrong.

STOTSKYNo, I'm sorry. I'm looking right at the document and I can count. There are 10 reading standards for informational text at each grade level and there are nine reading standards for literary texts from K to 12. When you count that up, 10 out of 19 is over 50 percent. This is for the English language arts teacher. Then there's a separate section for -- that's called literacy standards for social studies and science teachers. That is indeed for the social studies or the science teacher. But for the English language arts teacher, it is very clear that there are 19 standards, 10 of which are for informational text. And this is the dilemma that I am finding already expressed by teachers in Arkansas, as well as in Massachusetts. What do they teach for that over 50 percent of what seems to be required by the weight of the standards. Assessment can do something other than follow this. But I think we need to at least look at what is in the document and what the numbers of standards suggests.

GREELEYWell, I'm looking at my documents and I can read. And for that, I thank my English teacher, specifically Mrs. Pogonoski (ph) in Annapolis, MD, if she happens to be listening. But we've reached a philosophical impasse, which I think is really interesting. And I'd like to hear about it at the practical level from Leah, which is -- is it more important that we learn to read literature or that we learn to read documents? Do you run the risk, in your practical experience, of educating a nation of sort of pedestrian document readers?

LUKEIn the English class?

GREELEYYes, Leah.

LUKEI don't think we're moving that direction. Within the standards, there is a list of suggested reading for grades 6 through 12 and we're not losing anything here. I'm looking at the document right now. And side by side, I have literature and I have informational text and some of the suggestions that are coming out. These aren't mandatory required readings, but these are what are suggested. So we haven't lost "Little Women." We haven't lost "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "Fahrenheit 451." We have "Jane Eyre" in this list, "A Raisin in the Sun," by Lorraine Hansberry, which I'll begin teaching next week to my sophomores.

LUKEWe haven't lost that. What this does is outline a range of texts that we can draw from in grades 6 through 12. And on the informational text side, I'm looking at "Walden" by Thoreau. I'm looking at "The Gettysburg Address" by Abraham Lincoln. I'm looking at "The Great Fire" by Jim Murphy. And so it's rich in the literature suggestion and also in the informational text suggestions. Last week, I was at a conference in Portland, Oregon, and it was the National Forum for Educational Policy. And there was so much attention being paid to the fact that many of our college students have to be in remedial courses when they get to the university level.

LUKEAnd I think that remediation is occurring because we're not doing enough informational reading. We're not paying enough attention to reading for meaning at the upper levels, as perhaps we do at the elementary levels. And so I think -- I don't think we're losing anything, especially when you look at the suggested reading list that's in here -- in the standards. I think we're gaining attention and putting some attention on the informational reading so that we can avoid some of that remediation that's happening at the university level.

GREELEYWell, I have to say, I just don't know what the tenth grade would be in America without "Wuthering Heights." We're going to continue our conversation about a national core standard for education and, in particular, the role that the federal government is playing in encouraging states to adopt it. You're listening to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," WAMU 88.5. I'm Brendan Greeley from The Economist, sitting in for Kojo. We'll be back in a second.

GREELEYWelcome back. I'm Brendan Greeley from The Economist, sitting in on "The Kojo Nnamdi Show." We're talking about the Common Core Standards for Education. I have Michael Cohen from Achieve, Inc. in the studio and Sandra Stotsky from the University of Arkansas on the line, along with Leah Luke, Wisconsin's 2010 teacher of the year. There's an interesting aspect of this, which is that this is a state initiative among 48 states, but there is some federal encouragement.

GREELEYWe have an e-mail from Brian in Silver Spring, who remembers that President Clinton tried to do this 15 years ago. So we've been talking about the states, but the Fed looms large here and I'm wondering, Michael, if you can help me understand what the federal government's role is in moving this process forward.

COHENSure, I'd be happy to do that. First of all, the federal government had no role in developing the standards. They didn't help write them, they didn't finance them, they had a completely hands-off relationship to the standards entirely. They are, however, providing incentives for states to adopt them. And the primary vehicle for doing that has been the Education Department's Race to the Top program, a $3.5 billion competitive grants program for states. Secretary Duncan announced the winners of that last week. There were 12 states that have won grants altogether, including in this area, both D.C. and Maryland. And in order to be eligible to win those grants, the states had to commit to adopt the standards.

GREELEYLet me put a fine point on that. This is a kind of a Marshall Plan. There's money available. If you adhere to the Common Core Standards, then the money is there for you.

STOTSKYExactly.

COHENThat's correct.

GREELEYSandra, do you like that approach?

STOTSKYNo. I don't think that's an appropriate approach from a civic perspective, but I think we're leaving out a key player in all of this. It wasn't the federal government that developed and supported the development of Common Core Standards. It actually was the Gates Foundation and everybody knows that. It gave money both to the National Governors Association and CCSSO gave -- it funded reviews and comparisons of these standards. It helped to influence who got onto these committees. It has helped to develop a validity study. It has helped to develop support for these standards. It's now going beyond it and doing some post-secondary initiatives.

STOTSKYThe Gates Foundation, several years ago, seemed to know exactly what it wanted and what college and career readiness standards were to come out of the process. And it even had an issue -- an article in the February issue of the Phi Delta Kappan that explained what it thought was going to come out of the standards four months before they were even finalized. So I think we need to acknowledge that there have been some other players behind the scenes. It was not basically a state initiative at all. It was a Gates Foundation initiative and that has been the guiding force behind it all the way through. And...

GREELEYSandra, if I can synthesize your argument so far, they sort of -- they all come to a very interesting point, which is that there was a lack of accountability which you pointed out, which you were concerned about, as far as who was on the standards, how they were being prepared, when they were being prepared. And you worried about the funding sources as well and where this initiative is coming from. And if I can interpret what you're saying, it kind of sounds like your basic concern is that these Common Core Standards are undemocratic. Am I right there?

STOTSKYThat's right. Because I happened to be in the Massachusetts Department of Education during the five years when we were developing and revising all of our K-12 standards. So I know what a government agency is bound to do as part of an open transparent civic process.

GREELEYMichael's got his hand up in the studio.

COHENYeah. Yes. Sandra, you overlook the fact that the 36 or so states that have adopted the standards, each did that with its own elected or appointed State Board of Education, under the rules that govern those kinds of decisions in each state. They did not all get money from the Gates Foundation. Frankly, they did not all get money from the federal government. These are decisions that individual states made on their own with the responsible governing entities making these decisions. There's nothing undemocratic about this. In fact, as you well know, the Massachusetts State Board of Education voted unanimously to adopt these standards, even though, as you know because you helped write them, they had one of the most rigorous standards in the country. But they made an independent choice to adopt these standards in state.

GREELEYSandra, we've got some local decisions about adopt -- about whether or not to adopt these standards on the phone. Chris in Washington, D.C., you're supportive of the national standard?

CHRISI am, yes. I'm actually recently retired from the General Assembly and before that, spent ten years on the Fairfax County School Board. So I am very familiar with Virginia's standards of learning.

GREELEYMm-hmm.

CHRISAnd while I think that they were a strong set of standards, I'm very disappointed that at least to date Virginia has not chosen to adopt the Common Core Standards. I think they're higher standards and second, I think they're going to give states less room to hide. Sometimes now what we're seeing is states setting high standards, but then having a very low bar for what it means to pass their state assessment. I think that with the Common Core, one of the things that's going to happen nationally is that states won't have that room to hide. So that's why I think it is a good idea for states to sign on to the Common Core Standards.

GREELEYChris, engage...

LUKECan I -- can I...

GREELEY...engage in some conjecture for me real quick. Why do you think Virginia decided not to sign onto the standards?

CHRISWell, you know, it's partly -- there's just the Virginia thing that if we -- if we didn't invent it, you know, if Thomas Jefferson didn't help write it (laugh) I think we've always had a reluctance to join into national efforts. Second, you know, Virginia's standards were pretty good when they were established. And I'm just concerned that policymakers may not be looking at the way things really are today.

LUKEMay I add something from Wisconsin?

GREELEYPlease add something from Wisconsin.

LUKEI think, in all of this debate, we need to remember the kids and we really need to keep the students in focus in all of this. In June, I had the honor of speaking on behalf of the standards. And my students had been following my adventures throughout the school year and one of my students, we'll call her Rachel, she said, that is a really good idea. Now, this a sophomore. This is a 16-year-old. She said that's a really good idea, Mrs. Luke. Because when I moved into this district, I repeated everything that I did in my previous district. And that's 15 miles down the road.

STOTSKYWe owe it to our students to make sure that the target is clear. That if they move from one district to the next, if they move to Wisconsin from Illinois and then Wisconsin to Virginia, we owe it to our students that they get the same thing. That they're getting the same education across the United States.

STOTSKYI think a lot of us would agree with that. That was what I said was really not the main issue. National standards can be very desirable if they're first class. And the issue is, do we really have first-class standards or do we have something other than first-class standards. And I was trying to use as an example the high school math standards, which are not organized by course or standard -- by grade level so it's impossible to compare them with other countries that would not put out math standards at the high school level like that. In English, I tried to point out that we have these generic skills governing -- called College and Career-Readiness Standards, that govern the entire document.

STOTSKYSo the real question is not the value of national standards. It's a missed opportunity to have developed first-class national standards and I'm sure that that's what Mike and I can disagree on for another...

GREELEYWell...

STOTSKY...few days, hours or years.

GREELEYI'd like for the two of you to disagree in a different way. We're going to try an exercise for the next minute. We have a plea, over e-mail, from Sylvan in Shepherdstown, W. Va., who writes, "I have to say I'm a bit confused in general. I've always thought standards are a good idea, but clearly, at least one of your guests doesn't feel that way. I'm wondering what each of your guests thinks a parent should take away from this conversation." So I'm going to ask each of you to answer this. And I'm going to ask you also, keep your answer at the kitchen table or in the classroom. What will this mean to parents listening to this show? Mike?

COHENWhat parents should take away from this is that if they are in a state that has adopted these standards, they can be confident that each year they will be able to find out whether their student is being well-prepared and on track to be ready to succeed in post-secondary education and training by the time they leave high school. This is very practical, very focused, very much concerned about preparing students for the future.

GREELEYLeah?

LUKEAgain, and it comes down to the students. One of the things that I -- Karim mentioned as a math teacher in developing kind of outside sources, is that I've been looking on the Smithsonian website and the NASA website and the Brain Honey website, which is online classroom management system, and each of those sites has lesson plans and then you go in and you select which state you belong to. I think that's such a waste of resources, that we have all of these different standards depending on what state even though the lesson is the same. And so I think for the parents, it would be very reassuring to know that your child is going to be getting the same education as a child in Arkansas or a child in New York or a child in California, that they'll be getting the same deal.

GREELEYSandra, in four years, I will have two twins beginning school in Maryland. Talk to me.

STOTSKYI would say that when your children enter school, in the math class you will want to keep handy a copy of the Singapore math curriculum (laugh) for grades through K through six and watch to see how far behind your child gets by grade six or seven or eight, compared to that curriculum, which is in English, because I've looked at it. And mathematicians think very highly of it. It is different from what your child is going to get under a Common Core. In the English class, you're going to have to really look carefully to see what kinds of works the teacher is teaching and whether there is close analytical reading taking place from the teacher. Because that is the one thing we haven't mentioned. The issue of teaching kids how to read analytically, which may or may not come through from this set of standards.

STOTSKYBut the problem has not been so much what teachers assign in high school as to the pedagogical approach that's been used, a reader response or a contextual approach, which has not prepared them analytically for the kind of reading that they should be doing at the college level. So we've got a whole lot of things to sort out, but that's what you're going to have to think about as a parent.

GREELEYYou're listening to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show." I'm Brendan Greeley from The Economist, sitting in for Kojo. We pick up the phones at 1-800-433-8850. And where we're arrived in this conversation is the topic of Sputnik, which is that you can't talk about education without talking about how America stacks up against other countries. There's a constant fear that our children will not only fall behind other children in other states or at other schools, but that we will not be as competitive as Singapore or Finland or Germany. Is this a valid fear? How focused should we be outside of the United States when we talk about what our kids should learn?

COHENIt's not the only thing to worry about, but it is increasingly important because as I mentioned earlier, we're in a global economy. Our students really are competing for jobs with students and young people around the globe. So if we don't educate our students to the same high levels that other countries do, our economy, our ability to recovery from this terrible recession is going to be impeded. And the standards' writers and the states made sure that that's exactly what we did when the standards were being developed. They did look at the Singapore standards. We are making sure that students get a solid foundation and are ready to do algebra in eighth grade as they do in other countries. And it's just terribly important with regard to the standards, but also with regard to the teaching practices that we use that we be open to learning from other countries and other systems that are outperforming us.

GREELEYLeah, a teacher in Wisconsin. Are you worried about Singapore?

LUKEI think -- no. (laugh) But I am excited about the spiraling nature of these standards. I have a seven-year-old and a 10-year-old and a 13-year-old that attend schools in the district in which I teach and I'm really excited that the conversations are already starting in their buildings and that the teachers are having dialogues about how one year builds on the next year, builds on the next. It's not that the Wisconsin standards were bad before. It's that they were more like a one and done sort of thing, rather than a spiral and a build on one to the next, to the next, to the next. And then, when I get them as sophomores, I'm confident that they will have at least been exposed to the things that they need to be successful in English 10.

GREELEYWell, this is a tough subject because it involves two things that are very close to our heart, which we all feel in a visceral way, our children and our nation. Michael Cohen, Sandra Stotsky and Leah Luke, thank you all very much for a very interesting hour. "The Kojo Nnamdi Show" is produced by Diane Vogel, Brendan Sweeney, Tara Boyle, Michael Martinez and Ingalisa Schrobsdorff, with help from Kathy Goldgeier (sp?) and Elizabeth Weinstein. Diane Vogel is the managing producer. The engineer today is Tobey Shriner, (unintelligible) is on the phones. Podcasts of all shows, audio archives, CD's and transcripts by Softscribe are available at our website kojoshow.org. You're also invited to join us on Facebook or send us a tweet @kojoshow. I'm Brendan Greeley from The Economist sitting in on the Kojo Nnamdi Show. Thanks for listening.