States, including Washington, are moving fast to adopt the Common Core Standards Initiative, a state-led effort to align what students across the nation are learning. 

Today, July 21st, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation released their analysis of state standards across the nation.  This analysis compares the strength of each state's standards in English and math to the new Common Core Standards.

According to this analysis, Washington's English Language Arts standards are clearly inferior to the Common Core Standards, receiving a "C" for clarity and specificity, content and rigor. For example, Fordham points out that Washington's English standards "are vague and much of the critical content that students must learn to become proficient readers is simply absent." The analysis points out Washington's standards stop at grade 10, so that much important end-of-high-school content is entirely missing from the standards.  But Washington does provide voluminous standards on less critical content, such as assessing your own and your peer's effectiveness in communication and "social interaction skills." 

Washington's math standards, which in 2005 earned an "F" from the Fordham Foundation, were rewritten last year by a consultant hired by the State Board of Education in response to a legislative directive.  This new set of math standards has now earned an "A" from the Fordham Foundation. 

Here we have a clear example of how contracting out to a private consultant a government service (like writing learning standards) results in a superior product (math standards) and not doing so (English Language Arts) results in a mediocre product. 

And it simply boggles the mind to think of the money Washington state has spent on writing inferior standards, training teachers to teach to these inferior standards, developing the WASL based  on these inferior standards, and now replacing the WASL with the new Measurements of Student Progress for grades 3-8 and the new High School Proficiency Exam. Presumably these new tests incorporate the strong math standards and weak English standards.

How much will it cost Washington to rewrite these new tests to comply with the more rigorous English requirements of the national Common Core Standards?  And what if Washington does not receive Race to the Top Funding to offset the cost of this work? 

Who pays for all of these mistakes?  Will anyone be held accountable for this standards fiasco?