What Every Child Can Learn from Kentucky

As schools adopt the Common Core, nationwide standards, they are drawing lessons from an unlikely pioneer

  • Share
  • Read Later
Mauricio Alejo for TIME

(2 of 5)

The Birth of the Core

In 1893, 10 men met in a secret session at Columbia University in New York City until midnight, debating what American high schools should teach. In the final report, the Committee of Ten concluded that students deserved a strong liberal arts education--in which "every subject [is] taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be."

Ever since, generations have argued about whether these and subsequent standards are too hard or too easy for American kids and never reached a lasting consensus.

All the while, too many American students have found themselves unprepared for college or a decent job. One in five high school graduates who go to a four-year college (and half of those who go to community college) gets placed in remedial courses, stuck paying for college without getting college credit. In some states, like Hawaii, 38% of high school grads who try to enlist fail the Army's academic aptitude test; in Indiana, which has a higher child-poverty rate, only 13% fail, according to a 2010 report by the Education Trust. An American high school diploma means something radically different from state to state and from school to school, and many kids don't find out the real street value of their education until it's too late.

In 2009, hoping to disrupt this cycle of despair, the Kentucky state legislature passed a bill to throw out the state's standardized test and require higher education standards, benchmarked to international norms. "It was driven by Republicans from a conservative perspective--demanding higher standards for our kids," says Stu Silberman, executive director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, an influential education-reform organization in Kentucky.

At the same time, the National Governors Association, along with the Council of Chief State School Officers, was working on a similar blueprint. From the beginning, the Common Core standards were explicitly linked with what colleges and employers wanted young people to know. This way, students and their families could find out if they were off track much sooner--say in the third grade, when they still had time to do better, instead of in high school.

To design new standards for kindergarten through high school, a group of researchers collaborated with educators around the country. Experts in Massachusetts, which has long had among the most rigorous standards in the country, helped shape the literacy and math standards. Teachers in Georgia went to work on technical literacy, because the state had an exceptional track record in that field. Teachers from all over the country, meanwhile, pushed to keep the list of standards short and manageable.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5