With the stories last week about an effort to create national education standards, there have been a number of different reactions from education policy geeks. I thought that these two were the best.

First we have, Eduwonk.com who suggests that national standards are like health clubs:

In other words, signing on to this effort at this point is akin to joining a health club. One person can join a health club, workout daily, change their lifestyle habits and so forth. Another can join, eat Big Macs for lunch and come once a month to soak in the jacuzzi. They’re both still members of the same health club but the similarities end there.

As we’ve seen recently with the common graduation measures adopted by the states (which are hardly as intrusive as adoption of standards like this would be) these ideas often end up being treated like a la carte dining rather than the five-course meal they’re intended to be. States take the pieces they like, disregard the rest, and still say they’re in the club.*

And last but not least is Jay P. Greene who suggests that the analogy should be sausage making instead.

Every decade or so we have to debate the desirability of adopting national standards for education. People tend to be in favor of them when they imagine that they are the ones writing the standards. But when everyone gets into the sausage-making that characterizes policy formulation, it generally becomes clear that no one is going to get what they want out of national standards. What’s worse is that the resulting mess would be imposed on everyone. There’d be no more laboratory of the states, just uniform banality.

Of course, some people always hope that they’ll somehow manage to sneak their preferred vision into place without having to go through the meat grinder. That’s what is happening now with the National Governor’s Association effort at “voluntary” national standards. In a process completely lacking in transparency and open-debate, some are rushing to announce a national standards fait accompli.

So, we have a closed, secret process to create a national education standards that when they're done, no one has actually pledged to adopt them yet. Each state will still need to actually adopt these standards in order for them to have any impact. While I'm generally in favor of the idea of national standards, I'm afraid as with most government endeavors, this one sounds like a great idea, but the process to implement it might be fatally flawed. I'd love to see NGA and the CCSSO step forward and let everyone know who the actual academics are who will be creating these standards. They will need buy-in from the education geeks across the country if these standards will ever be adopted. That would be a good first step.