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A draft of the the Common Core State Standards in K12 appeared yesterday, and the media have taken notice. As far as I can tell so far, response to the draft has been pretty positive. (The public comment period is now open.) I just hope the public and policymakers don't lose interest before we do the hard work of giving people in schools the time and support they need to use the standards well in the classroom.

The English Language Arts standards in particular have gone over very well with some groups that were skeptical at the outset. Core Knowledge, Common Core, and Fordham all like what they see. I've had some time to page through the ELA standards myself and am impressed. The suggested reading list is especially substantive and diverse: Homer, Euclid, Donne, de Tocqueville, MLK, Lahiri, Morrison, and even Enzensberger!

Of course, not everyone is on board. Officials from the only two states that declined to take part in the Common Core standards initiative--Texas and Alaska--were quick to declare their own standards equal or superior to the Common Core. (Groups that review state standards, like Fordham and the AFT, might well disagree.)

Then there's of course the Cato Institute's Neal McClusky, who sees the whole effort as a dangerous diversion from the boundless promise of the free market. He's right to argue that standards alone don't promise much of anything. But I don't much care for his vision of unilateral educational disarmament. Sorry, but a pure free market won't set us free in this case.

Instead, we need to be sure that schools have the support they need to put the standards to the best possible use. Here's what we wrote when we endorsed the initiative last summer:

To be successful, the initiative also needs to be supported by aligned curriculum and aligned assessments. The federal government can offer resources to support such assessments. As required by federal law, however, the federal government should not be directly involved in their development or require the implementation of any particular assessment. Educators will need the time, professional development and resources to ensure that they can use the standards effectively in the classroom.