A Friend of Dave forwarded this Washington Post story this morning about an effort to create national education standards.

Forty-six states and the District of Columbia today will announce an effort to craft a single vision for what children should learn each year from kindergarten through high school graduation, an unprecedented step toward a uniform definition of success in American schools.

The push for common reading and math standards marks a turning point in a movement to judge U.S. children using one yardstick that reflects expectations set for students in countries around the world at a time of global competition. Today, each state decides what to teach in third-grade reading, fifth-grade math and every other class. Critics think some set a bar so that students can pass tests but, ultimately, are ill-prepared.

Led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the states, including Maryland and Virginia, are aiming to define a framework of content and skills that meet an overarching goal. When students get their high school diplomas, the coalition says, they should be ready to tackle college or a job. The benchmarks would be "internationally competitive."

Once the organizers of the effort agree to a proposal, each state would decide individually whether to adopt it.

I see three big issues with this actually working. That last line is first of the critical issues. It is one thing to agree to come up with a set of national standards. It is quite another thing to abandon the standards your state's education bureaucracy has created in order to adopt national standards. Look at California's reluctance to abandon its faux accountability system to rely on NCLB's AYP as the measure of school success. Instead, they've simply run both systems simultaneously, much to the confusion of everyone. And I do mean everyone. Given this experience, we have little reason to believe that states would actually abandon their own standards to adopt these unless President Obama is willing to print up a little more money to throw the state's way.

The second critical issues will be matching assessments. The new standards will be worthless unless we have matching assessments to show how well or poorly a state is doing at getting its students to meet these new "internationally competitive" standards.

The final critical issue is whether educators will modify practice to match the new standards. Unfortunately, even if the first two pieces fall into place, it could all be for nothing if it doesn't impact what happens in the classroom. California already has very high education standards but it hasn't seen a matching increase in academic performance. There are still lots of other issues that prevent effective, standards-based instruction from happening in too many of California's classrooms.

In my mind, unless all three of those things happen, this effort will just be an interesting intellectual exercise and won't have the slightest impact on our public education system's ability to prepare students for college or the world of work.