By Joe Robertson

Getting Missouri and Kansas and everyone else to agree on what all American children should know by the time they graduate figures to be a hard-won consensus.

But the big goals in the movement toward the Common Core State Standards are certainly enticing.

Teachers across state lines will relish being able to teach to deeper levels, following the trend of many competing nations that effectively spend more time on fewer learning targets.

Students will be more engaged with more time — and rich technology — to burrow into lessons that thrill them.

So say the believers in what is now a joint commitment of more than 40 states, including Kansas and Missouri, to hold students to the same national standards, measured by the same tests.

Educators would not be so nervous if there were a clearer path out of the morass of 50 states’ standards. Cowed by the test-heavy frenzy from the federal No Child Left Behind Act, they are clearly worried about the details.

When Missouri arranged a series of eight Common Core workshops for January and February, they sold out like a slate of Garth Brooks concerts.

“Some are in a little bit of a panic mode,” said Sharon Waite of the Show-Me Curriculum Administrator’s Association. But in the end, she added, “I think teachers will be sighing with relief.”

The administrators’ group and the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education arranged the workshops and thought eight would be enough. Now they plan to record the sessions to create Web versions for the many educators they have had to turn away.

“We had no idea of the response we were going to get for these,” Missouri’s director of curriculum, Sharon Hoge, told more than 100 educators gathered Jan. 25 at the Raytown School District’s Education Center.

Fifth- and sixth-grade teacher Linda Heeler came down from Maryville and the Horace Mann Laboratory School to walk through the complicated exercises of merging standards.

“Every school district knows it’s going to be evaluated by these standards,” she said. “You have to know what’s expected of teachers and kids.

“You want to be here.”

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Think about it, said curriculum specialist Heidi Hayes Jacobs. We’re already 10 percent of the way through the 21st century.

The timing of all this rewriting of standards “is as critical as it can be,” she recently told a theater full of Kansas City School District teachers and principals. “This is an opportunity to reboot.”

Jacobs, who runs the Web-based venture Curriculum 21, is one of many futuristic thinkers trying to help school districts explore ideas beyond the new educational frameworks.

Schools should dive in, she said, with links to classrooms across the world, multimedia student projects, Web fusions, social networks.

“The standards are not curriculum,” she stressed.

Standards simply establish common expectations of what children should know. School districts and their teachers will continue to determine how children get there. Creativity can rule the day.

The federal government’s attempted low profile in the standards movement is no accident.

The political atmosphere would not stomach federal school standards conjured up out of Washington, D.C. — and the fact that more than 40 states have signed on suggests the promise of state autonomy is winning out.

It also helps that the project is first tackling the easier consensus around language arts and math, saving the more contentious subjects of science and social studies for later.

“States have to remain in control of this for it to be successful,” said Chris Minnich, senior membership director of the Council of Chief State School Officers.

The council teamed with the National Governors Association to marshal the effort, now three years in the works.

Numerous concerns have propelled the movement.

States and their schools could not effectively compare their achievements with other states. It was hard to identify successful schools or programs when one state’s performance test was easier than another’s.

School systems needed a more global zeal to compete with high-performing students in Europe and Asia. Educators and industry leaders trumpeted a need for all states to perform at a high level, and a nationally accepted brand of standards and tests seemed essential to get there.

A federal presence persists, however, particularly over the past year as many states competed for Race to the Top stimulus funding awarded by the Obama administration. Although states did not have to show plans for adopting the national standards to compete, it was clearly seen as an important advantage.

The Center on Education Policy surveyed 37 states committed to the Common Core standards and released a report in January that showed 36 of them said they came on board to improve the rigor of their standards. But 30 said they also took into consideration the chance to strengthen their bids for the federal funds. They signed on, although 25 said they worried about the costs of implementation, and 22 were concerned about potential intrusion on state autonomy.

• • •

Some easy-to-grasp changes sit atop the pile of details.

The common standards narrow the focus on goals at each grade level, tearing away at the reputation of U.S. schools for going “a mile wide and an inch deep” in what they try to cover in their classrooms.

The new standards put a heavier emphasis on nonfiction and informational reading and argumentative writing — citing the role of communication in excelling in academic fields and career readiness.

Fluency in technology is embedded throughout the standards.

The trick comes in taking the state standards anchoring school districts’ active curriculums and translating it all into a new language.

“There is no magic code ring,” said Tom Foster, who directs the process for the Kansas Department of Education.

Consultants sometimes spend hours matching up a single standard, he said.

Missouri educators in the Raytown workshop took a crack at it, matching just a few standards to get a taste of what curriculum writers have gotten themselves into.

Take common core standard No. 5.OA3, they were told. That is fifth-grade operations and algebraic thinking, analyzing patterns and relationships.

By the time they were done, educators had split it up among five Missouri standards in the state’s grade-level expectations, dipping into algebraic and geometric and spatial relationships across a couple of grade spans.

There is still time to sort it out. Schools will remain on the current standards and tests for two more years, said Hoge, the Missouri curriculum director, but the state wants schools to prepare now for the transition.

Two major groupings of the states are simultaneously collaborating on creating common tests to measure state performance. The promise of comparable exams is particularly welcomed in Missouri, whose state test has ranked among the stiffest in the nation.

Consequently, more than twice as many Missouri schools have come under federal sanctions for poor performance as Kansas schools.

“We want to be on a level playing field,” said seventh-grade literature teacher Tonni Schmidt, who had come from Holden to the Raytown workshop.

As for science and social studies, the Common Core organizers have commissioned the National Research Council and Achieve Inc. to help develop those standards.

It will be tricky navigating some of science’s flashpoints, such as evolution and climate change, or determining whose history will make the standards. But educators for the most part are glad those disciplines will be included, said Foster of the Kansas Department of Education.

Science and history mostly were left out of the No Child Left Behind testing wave. The Common Core, at its best, represents a unified focus across the nation on the future, he said.

“There is concern that if they don’t create common standards (for history and science), they will be left out of the party,” Foster said.

“So let the fun begin.”