k12reboot

“Closing the Door on Education Innovation” is a new article on The Public Discourse by Greg Forster of the Foundation for Educational Choice.  He discusses how the push for national standards is part of a newly-revived movement for more national curriculum and assessments.  As other observers have noted, the monopoly nature of local school districts means that parents have not been able to exercise the types of choice that support accountability and quality in other parts of our lives.  As might be expected, in the absence of market-based discipline, monopolies invite regulation.  The organizational dysfunction and failure to meet student needs in many districts has brought more state and national regulation into the picture, from the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation to numerous state initiatives to promote student achievement in reading, math and science.  State and national government have provided the fastest-growing sources of school funding, but with that funding comes more regulation and micromanagement by distant bureaucrats. 

In his article, Forster explains how the movement for “national standards”, in the form of the Common Core standards, could make schools even less responsive to the needs of local families.  Then why do it?  Why homogenize even further a system that has proved so unresponsive to student needs?  The answer lies, at least in part, in the economics of the education business, which is dominated by two companies, Pearson Education and McGraw Hill.  Currently, those companies must offer variations of textbooks and other curriculum materials aligned to the different standards in all of the various states.  Sometimes even individual districts (usually large ones) within those states want additional modifications that are specific to their local requirements.  All of those variations involve big costs for the curriculum companies, which must create separate versions of their products for each customer and mount separate lobbying and marketing efforts tailored to those customers.  Pearson and McGraw Hill do benefit by designing separate assessments for all of those different customers and learning standards, but assessment is “just” a $2.3 billion market.  The big money is in selling all of the curriculum products that prepare students to take those tests.  Having to meet 50 different state standards and numerous other customer requests adds costs and inconvenience for those two companies.  

Education vendors clearly benefit from the economies of scale offered by homogenized standards. But do students benefit?  Over the next few years, states like Massachusetts and financially distressed California, which already had highly regarded K-12 learning standards, will be spending millions of dollars to convert their standards to the Common Core, and more important, to purchase revamped curriculum and tests that supposedly support those new standards.  To see just one example from Georgia of the financial pressure for national homogenization, please see this article, “Cornering the Education Market” , which details the conflicts of interest that pervade that state’s plans to revamp it’s standards, curriculum, and tests.  As often happens behind the scenes in the education industry, people with ties to the largest vendors are also involved in the creation of requirements for the curriculum materials and assessments that supposedly will teach, and measure progress against, the new standards.  The Georgia link is also in Forster’s article, but it is so illustrative that it warrants an appearance here as well.