Centralization of everything through Washington DC ensures that rot will spread throughout the country at once. State jurisdiction keeps this from happening. It was one othe things this country was built on. It’s why we became stronger than the UK, our mother nation.

1. Explain the significance of Abraham, Moses, Naomi, Ruth, David, and Yohanan ben Zaccai in the development of the Jewish religion.

2. List the policies and achievements of the emperor Shi Huangdi in unifying northern China under the Qin Dynasty.

3. Identify the location of the Kush civilization and describe its political, commercial, and cultural relations with Egypt.

Consider, from the above, the person of Yohanan ben Zaccai. I have actually been forced — gotta teach the standards! — to prepare a lesson plan FOR SIXTH GRADERS to teach of his role in preserving Jewish knowledge after the destruction of the Second Temple. Yet, I have now asked at least 25 Jews, many of them veterans of Hebrew school and Bar Mitzvahs, and have not found ONE who has heard of this guy.

The usefulness of standards is real, but vastly overrated, IMHO, and they can be damaging as well.

Standards tend to be either so broad and complete that you can’t really do anything in a classroom without hitting one — for example, lists of all the components of good writing — or so specific and non-transferable (as a skill or foundational understanding) as to be useful only for memorization test prep, i.e., lists of the key battles of important wars.

For those who don’t know about, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., he is a very controversial old-school advocate of cultural homogeniety and assimilation, arguing that if every kid knows all the terms and facts that a white middle-class American adult does, they can succeed. His books included lists of thousands of this normative vocab, everything from traditional academic stuff to names of important Disney movies, etc. Rather than an afterthought to teaching, he believes these are a pass to success and should be taught as an end in and of themselves.