Real News From The Blaze' Discusses One-Size-Fits-All Federal Education Standards

Two years ago, 46 states adopted Common Core, a national set of education standards designed to improve school and student performance in math and reading. The Wall Street Journal reports that the voluntary academic standards across each grade were heavily promoted by the Obama administration through its $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition. The program has now though come under recent fire in at least five states that have adopted it, as opponents of the Common Core worry that it’s created a “national curriculum” at the expense of state and local municipalities specific needs. WSJ reports:

A 2010 report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning educational-research group, said the Common Core standards "are clearly superior to those currently in use in 39 states in math and 37 states in English. For 33 states, the Common Core is superior in both math and reading."

But conservative lawmakers and governors in at least five states, including Utah and Alabama, recently have been pushing to back out, or slow down implementation, of Common Core. They worry that adoption of the standards has created a de facto national curriculum that could at some point be extended into more controversial areas such as science.

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A study released this year by a researcher at the Brookings Institution think tank projected Common Core will have no effect on student achievement. The study said states with high standards improved their national math and reading scores at the same rate as states with low standards from 2003 to 2009.

On "Real News" Thursday the panel opened up discussing this case and whether standards for education should be made at the federal level, or for that, anywhere outside the local school boards.

Jedediah Bila argues that policy like Common Core takes the flexibility out of the education system. From experience as an educator, Jedediah believes that individual classrooms come from different academic backgrounds and have different needs where they would perhaps not all function best when forced to learn at the same nationally set curriculum.

"Once you say on a national level, we're going to do something--a one size fits all approach," Bila said. "That takes away all the individualized approach to education--that makes it work in places like charter schools--and it tears it out of the system."

Playing devil's advocate, Will Cain made the point that advocates for national standards have many statistics on their side showing that without federal guidelines, the same states fail to compete on the same level of their piers. Watch a clip from the segment below: