I tweeted this idea out earlier today:

Radical Notion: National standards should be written by successful people not of that field. Poets writing math standards, etc…

Think about it for a moment. It makes more sense than it seems at first.

Here’s my thoughts that get me there… in a somewhat logical progression:

1. Standards are currently made by the people who work in the field and care deeply about the standards.
2. Those folks are going to have a somewhat skewed view of what everyone should know about the subject.
3. This contributes to the problem we have where high school teachers teach subjects before they teach kids… which in practice often looks like teaching to the 10-20% of the class who do love the subject and may major in it.
4. If we are to believe that national standards are important, then it should contribute to a body of skills and knowledge that are important enough that people should be able to know / do those things long after they graduate.
5. And yet, most successful adults would struggle greatly with passing many of our high school standardized tests.
6. Which suggests that the standards (or at the very least the way we measure the standards) are off.

So how do we discover what every American needs to know about history? About science? About math? About reading and writing?

I don’t believe it is by asking the experts of the field.

I want to know what math the CEO of NBC uses every day. I want to know what math a state senator uses. I want to know what science a writer for the New York Times feels is important to her to do her job. I want to know what history a surgeon finds is important to know. Let’s convene those panels and try to come up with the standards that a fully-realized citizen needs to know to take an active role in their world.

Of course the mathematician wants every to understand sine and cosine, but if the overwhelming majority of citizens have no need for trig functions, then why is it on the graduation test? Of course the scientist wants us all to be able to balance equations, but I haven’t used that specific information since high school. Why are assessing it for proficiency?

Let’s let the successful people of the world, with the benefit of hindsight about their own schooling, sit down with the teachers. Let’s all listen to each other and remember that what we want the standards to do is to create a floor under which no child falls. We have to keep in mind that these standards do not live in isolation, instead being obviously linked to a participatory life. Listening to the people who didn’t make the subject area their life work but still lived a productive, successful life is probably is a good place to start.