In part, the new Common Core standards and the current push toward Core-aligned PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests have come as a natural response to America’s historical apples and oranges testing situation. I am sure data wizards have been scratching their heads for decades as they tried to compare Mississippi students to Maine students. Without common tests, that comparison cannot be made, and in the old days when states devised their own tests, no overarching, statistically valid comparison between states was possible. Among other considerations, the Common Core was developed to standardize data between states.

I would like to pose a few questions, though. Do we need Mississippi and Maine to be comparable? If so, why? How do our students benefit? How do our schools benefit? Once we answer these questions, we need to ask and answer the most important question: Will the expected benefits from data standardization be worth the enormous costs from retooling the U.S. educational system, especially since no data thus far suggests that the new standards will actually solve our most critical problem — the large disparities in learning between more and less fortunate zip codes?

If standards are not the problem — and no proof exists that our previous standards created our current educational inequalities — then the enormous time, money and effort that have been sunk into the Core and changed tests have essentially been a diversion, stealing resources from students who have fallen behind, a diversion created for the sake of “better” data.

Data should not be determining our instruction. Our students should be determining our instruction. Specifically, a child testing at a third-grade level in mathematics should not be immersed in seventh grade mathematics because he happens to be thirteen and we want statistically comparable test scores for all of America’s thirteen-year-old students. That student should be receiving intensive mathematical instruction designed to pull him up through the elementary curriculum as quickly as possible. He should also be exempt from time-sucking standardized tests that he cannot do.