At a time when states have been lowering their educational standards to avoid penalties coming from the nearly decade-old No Child Left Behind legislation, a major new direction is underway.

A panel of educators appointed by the nation’s governors and education commissioners has proposed a comprehensive set of standards to be used in the development of curriculum in mathematics and English for the country’s school children from kindergarten through high school.

In a March article in the New York Times, Sam Dillon, a former assistant secretary of education who has been fighting for national standards for nearly 20 years, said that it’s a historical moment. He quotes Chester E. Finn Jr., who said, “I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education. Now we have the possibility that for the first time, states could come together around new standards and high school graduation requirements that are ambitious and coherent. This is a big deal.”

However, some are nervous the standards are too strict.

“You may have seen the poster that hangs on the wall in my office which says ‘Childhood should be a journey, not a race’,” said North Haven superintendent Sara-Jane Querfeld. “This is at the core of my beliefs about early childhood education. I am afraid that the joy of childhood will be replaced by ‘drills’ and cause our little people to lose precious time playing, creating, inventing, dreaming, and socializing if kindergarten becomes any more academic.”

Former North Haven resident Dr. Marcy Guddemi, executive director of the Gesell Institute, located on the Yale University campus, stated in a recent press release, “The proposed [national] standards for kindergarten through grade 3 are unrealistic and will lead to inappropriate ‘rote drill and kill’ teaching practices in the classroom. Policy and standards should be set or based on hard data and not on unrealistic and simplistic goals in the hopes of raising test scores.”

Gesell Institute has called for a re-write of the proposed standards for grades K-3 in order to focus on researching proven principles of child development from birth to eight years of age. “Research clearly shows that early readers do not have an advantage over later readers at the end of third grade,” Guddemi writes in her press release, “and attempts at closing the achievement gap should not be measured in kindergarten based on inappropriate standards.”

Ed Miller, program director for The Alliance for Childhood, a non-profit Maryland group focused on education, wrote two weeks ago, “These standards will intensify an already inappropriate emphasis on cognitive development of young children that is divorced from social-emotional and physical development. Current practices are already causing enormous stress in children’s lives. These new standards will add to that.”

Crista Marchesseault, a North Haven resident and associate director at Gesell Institute, as well as the parent of a preschooler, said, “The proposed standards concern me not only as a child development professional, but as the parent of a four-year-old who will be entering public school in the fall. While I believe that North Haven schools respect child development in the face of the detrimental polices that have been in place since NCLB was passed, I worry about my child and so many others in the face of unrealistic expectations and an over-reliance on test scores."

Only Texas and Alaska have opted not to participate in the new standards, which were undertaken last fall. Texas has been in the news recently regarding an effort to revise its U.S. history curriculum with a determination to downplay the role of Thomas Jefferson. Dillon wrote of the state, “Gov. Rick Perry argued that only Texans should decide what children their learn.” There is no penalty under existing law for failure to participate, but grants awarded under the Department of Education’s “Race to the Top,” as well as Title 1 funding, are partially based on such compliance.

Thus far, only Kentucky has actually adopted the standards, which were open to public comment through April 2. Connecticut has had required standards in place since the ‘80s, but revisions will likely be necessary should national standards be enforced. The National Council of Teachers of English, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Association of State Boards of Education, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and even the two major teacher unions (NEA and AFT,) have endorsed the new standards, but notable early childhood organizations have taken exception to mandated standards for young children.