If you didn't catch it earlier this week, the American Federation of Teachers--the nation's second largest teachers union--came out and publicly endorsed the idea of national standards for our schools. Writing on behalf of the union's 1.4 million members, AFT President Randi Weingarten (who was rumored to have been on Governor Patterson's very short list of possibles for junior Senator from New York) offered a passionate and persuasive call for changing our current kaleidoscope of what we intend to teach our children based on the lottery of zip code.

The best and easiest way to give a concise explanation for why we need national standards, as Ms. Weingarten successfully argues in her op-ed, is either to explain the current system of state standards and how it is (or isn't working)... or it's to reference another authority in video format. Let's go with the latter. Take it away Mr. Colbert:

So why is it that No Child Left Behind set ambitious proficiency goals for all students but left it up to the states to measure, or in some cases jerry-rig, their results? One reason why is that education has long been a local issue in America, so much so that the United States Supreme Court has declared that there is no such thing as an American right to education. (There is, of course, an American right to own a gun). The idea that education is a local matter has often resulted in the federal government deferring to local and state school officials to decide what gets taught in school. Thus, when NCLB was passed in 2001, in order to ensure that enough Republicans would vote for the bill, the President and its supporters in the Congress could not require all states to hold their children to the same high standard since NCLB was already viewed as being too much federal intrusion into education. The result. as many observers have put it, is a state vs. state race to the bottom in many instances where states have reason to expect less out of children rather than more. (To be fair, quite a few states have held the line in adopting high standards for their school children despite pressure to do the opposite).

A second reason why there is not yet a single national standard for all American children is that some stakeholders--namely teachers unions--were reluctant to support such an idea. The AFT, of course, has broken out of this reluctance, and kudos to them for doing so. But the NEA and its more than 3 million members continues to take no position in support of treating children equally by geography in terms of what we plan to teach them; a position that owes in large part to the NEA's belief that standards and tests are themselves a flawed way of measuring student performance.

With the AFT moving towards recognizing the importance of uniform high standards for our children, one must wonder whether there will be a serious discussion on this topic when No Child Left Behind comes up for reauthorization under the Obama Administration...