Editor’s note: This commentary is by Vermont Secretary of Education Armando Vilaseca. It was first published in the Burlington Free Press.
Vermont, along with 44 other states, adopted a common set of educational standards called the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) which will be used to articulate what we expect our students to know and demonstrate in grades pre-K-12. Vermont’s current Framework of Standards has been in place for over a decade and has served us well. As society’s needs change and the expectations for schools change, our standards must also be adjusted.
CCSS provide all of the participating states a common platform to build their local curricula. It’s important to point out that the local schools and teachers still decide how they want to teach and what curriculum they use, the standards provide the schools and teachers with a framework. These standards are an evolution of our current standards and are written to prepare all students to be “college and career ready” by the time they graduate from high school.
I understand and support the concept of states’ rights, but this idea no longer makes sense when we have become such a mobile and transient society.
Vermont played an active role in the adoption of these standards as former Gov. James Douglas (then chair of the National Governors Association) worked with President Obama to initiate this work. Vermont has experience working across state lines, as we were a founding member of the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP); we collaborated with New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island to develop rigorous common standards and uniform assessments. Our New England experience was used as a model for the CCSS.
For many years, as a Vermont educator, I could never understand why as a nation we had 50 sets of standards, and why each state had different sets of goals for their students to meet. I understand and support the concept of states’ rights, but this idea no longer makes sense when we have become such a mobile and transient society. Often these moves mean students miss information or have lessons repeated because of the incongruence of our state standards. Additionally, the assessments aligned to these standards are used to compare states even though the standards have varying levels of difficulty.
