I can see where national standards could be a dangerous thing but I think we need something. A friend told me that her best bud left our area with kid in Special Ed and behind, only to move down South and have the school wanting to skip the child ahead! How does that happen? Which school is right? In Time magazine several years ago, they compared state assessments to national assessments...You can have one state where all the kids are proficient on state assessment and only 10% proficient on national assessment. (You then have to ask which assessment is a more accurate measure of course) I think their needs to be flexibility....areas w/ a unique ecosystem would spend more time studying it than somewhere that didn't have it, for example.
