No Standards

There is a lot of complaining about the interstate variation in standards and the corresponding variation in what it means for a student to be proficient or for a school to make “adequate yearly progress”. Yet defined standards are not going away. The only other plausible alternative on the table is to have nationally defined ones. But that’s not a palatable alternative for most of the same folks grumbling about the interstate differences either. And it’s surely not going to fly with most conservatives. These compromises don’t happen by accident.