In today’s news there is a story about mandatory voluntary national standards for education. These are not EMS standards/protocols, but the issues are not significantly different. I will specifically address EMS standards/protocols in other posts, but the parallels should be pretty clear. The Patrick administration will not adopt national academic standards if they are lower than those established in Massachusetts, long championed as having among the most rigorous expectations, according to the state’s education secretary. [1] That is a sensible response, but maybe we need to consider it from the opposite direction. Is any other response sensible? There is an advantage to being able to move from state to state and have a child transfer directly into the same grade. As a parent, I have moved across state lines several times. In my case, this advantage would have been minimal. The advantage does not seem to justify a national standard, unless that national standard produces very little harm in its unintended consequences. “We are trying to sound the alarm,’’ said Jim Stergios, the institute’s (The Pioneer Institute, a conservative-leaning public policy research organization in Boston) executive director. “Massachusetts has the highest standards in the nation. Why would you want to change course?’’ [1] That is the big problem with the idea of national standards. National standards seem to place more value on uniformity, than on quality. As with EMS, there are plenty of advantages to national standards. There is a big drawback when statewide standards, or nationwide standards, are proposed. Promises of benefits are the focus, but when the everybody standards are enacted, a mindless devotion to uniformity replaces many of the benefits. Rather than have the standards raise up the places with lower quality, there is a backpedaling on raising the standards. The new goal is to prevent the standards from becoming a hardship for those who might benefit the most from standards. The result is often a set of standards that makes improvement for the places of low quality optional .

Original Source of National Standards for Education