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During the early 2000s, the notion of educational standards became publicly familiar through news reports of developments within K-12 education. The discussion around standards, however, has often been mired in misunderstandings.

A source of confusion is the semantic overlap between “standards” in its everyday usage and “standards” in the educational sense meaning statements of what students should know and be able to do at various stages of their learning. This confusion seems to have become almost subliminal, implying that the attainment of “high educational standards” in the general sense necessarily depends on the existence of written documents giving body to “standards” in the technical sense.

The confusion multiplied with the advent of the Common Core State Standards around 2010. CCSS would supposedly solve the problem that arose when, in response to the No Child Left Behind mandates of 2001, states scrambled in isolation to develop their own educational standards. In other words, CCSS would supersede previous state documents and ensure that students from Maine to Hawaii were “on the same page.”

After half a decade of shifts and adjustments, when schools have labored to recast curriculum and instruction in terms of CCSS, to integrate new educational materials bearing the imprimatur of “Common Core alignment,” and to prepare students for the sprawling new tests that have followed, it is time perhaps to engage in stocktaking and re-examine our commitment to CCSS.

Have the standards met the high expectations with which they were so enthusiastically promoted? Have they, for instance, begun to “erase the achievement gap” and “level the playing field” between advantaged and disadvantaged students? Have they helped unjam us from our chronically rusted slot in international education rankings?

The current evidence has answered these and similar questions in the negative. CCSS has not fulfilled the enthusiastic claims of its ubiquitous pundits. Indeed, critics have identified it as a primary factor in the ongoing decline of American education — a decline marked by alarming teacher attrition, student apathy engendered by over-testing and an ever-expanding charter school movement that eats at education funding and disrupts school communities through the illusion of choice while failing to produce substantially better results.

An obvious further question is the extent to which this decline is attributable to CCSS. The complaints against the standards are numerous and include criticism of the politics behind its development, promotion and implementation, as well as criticism of its contents.

Amid the frequently heated discussions, one aspect has not been widely or sufficiently addressed — namely, the claim that CCSS was internationally benchmarked against quality standards from other countries. In fact, a close comparison of CCSS with standards from top-performing systems is highly instructive and can make CCSS seem rushed, slipshod, devoid of a sound foundation in educational philosophy and simultaneously over- and under-ambitious.

Let’s briefly consider a common theme of CCSS criticism: Its standards are developmentally inappropriate. In comparison with the content of Finland’s National Core Curriculum, the Common Core standards appear, if not developmentally inappropriate, then at least overly precise and prescriptive, implying that every child can be expected to master identical sets of skills and knowledge at the same grade level. The Finnish standards, by contrast, are simultaneously fewer in number, richer and more suggestive in detail and worded in a manner that discourages prescriptive demands or uniform expectations.

We owe it to ourselves to consider Common Core a failed experiment and to study the curriculum documents of Finland and other top-performing countries as potential models in the development of new educational guidelines.

Finnish education expert Pasi Sahlberg has explained the difference between CCSS and Finnish standards as follows: While all Finnish schools must adhere to the content of the National Core Curriculum, the curriculum objectives are worded in general terms, and schools are expected to flesh out the objectives with grade-level specifications (standards) appropriate to the populations they serve.

Here, I would argue, is where CCSS exposes its Achilles heel. The tightly prescriptive wording of the standards suggests, both that its makers have reduced educational significance to quantifiable learning targets easily assessed through multiple choice items on standardized tests, and that such one-size-fits-all standards will eventually suit the profile of the average American student after he or she has been properly “Common Core aligned” along with the rest of the system.

In short, the individuals who supposedly benchmarked CCSS against international standards did not know what they were doing.

Finland’s National Core Curriculum is readily available in English translation. Even a cursory overview grants the impression of a superior set of standards serving a superior educational system — standards, moreover, that were designed by teachers, in contrast to the employees of educational corporations and think tanks who wrote CCSS.

We owe it to ourselves to consider Common Core a failed experiment and to seriously study the curriculum documents of Finland and other top-performing countries as potential models in the development of educational guidelines that will put us on a strong footing for success in the coming decades.