New National School Standards

From the NY Times:

A panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents proposed a uniform set of academic standards on Wednesday, laying out their vision for what all the nation’s public school children should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.

Under the proposed standards for English, for example, fifth graders would be expected to explain the differences between drama and prose, and to identify elements of drama like characters, dialogue and stage directions. Seventh graders would study, among other math concepts, proportional relationships, operations with rational numbers and solutions for linear equations.

I will try to take a look at these later and say something substantive about them, but I repeat that all these bureaucratic efforts have very little impact on how much children learn. That is determined almost entirely by their parents and their teachers.