As far as national standards - I'm all for them simply because I doubt my kids will be educated only in one state/district. The lack of common standards can be terrible for kids whose families have to move, for instance those in the military.
The problem with national standards is that they will almost invariably end up being those of California. That's what everything standardizes to in this country, otherwise known as "lowest common denominator". My folks moved away from California 39 years ago because the schools had gotten so bad. By the time I finished high school, twenty-odd years ago, the California standards had caught up with Colorado (which is twenty years behind in most things). Now we start talking about national standards, and you can bet that will be the ones we get.
