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EDITORIAL

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: November 19, 2013

The New York Times

The country is engaged in a fierce debate about two educational reforms that bear directly on the future of its schoolchildren: first, teacher evaluation systems that are taking hold just about everywhere, and, second, the Common Core learning standards that have been adopted by all but a few states and are supposed to move the schools toward a more challenging, writing-intensive curriculum.

Both reforms — or at least the principles behind them — got a welcome boost from reading and math scores released recently by the federal government. Although the nation as a whole still has a long way to go to match high-performing school systems abroad, states that have toughened their teacher evaluations and standards have shown positive results.

Two examples are the District of Columbia and Tennessee, among the first to install more ambitious standards and teacher evaluations. Tennessee jumped from 46th in the country in fourth-grade math two years ago to 37th, and from 41st in the nation to 34th in eighth-grade reading. The District of Columbia, though still performing below the national average, has also shown progress. The scores of its students improved significantly in both math and English.

Moreover, according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the eight states that managed to get the Common Core standards in place in time for the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress exams this year showed improvement from 2009 scores in either reading or math.

Nationwide, the story is less encouraging. For example, on this year’s assessment, fourth graders and eighth graders, on average, showed only slight gains from two years ago in math and reading scores. Even worse, the results show that less than half of the nation’s students are performing at a proficient level in either math or reading as judged by the federal rating system, indicating that the country is not moving swiftly enough toward its goal of preparing students for work in a global economy. Equally worrisome is the continuing gap between low-income and more-affluent students.

But the progress seen elsewhere — like Tennessee and the District of Columbia — shows that improvement is possible if the states strengthen their resolve and apply solutions that have been shown to work.