The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System has long been the tool by which the commonwealth’s students have been evaluated in response to such questions as, “Did Paul Revere take the Pike, or back roads, in his famous ride to warn us all that British cooking was coming?”

The presumption, based in part on data and in part on commonwealth snobbery, was that our assessment system was more grueling, robust and demanding than, say, South Dakota, where the kids merely had to compute what the average yield-per-acre would be, if wheat were planted in triangles and fertilizer were sprinkled from 5-ounce thimbles.

This explains, in part, why many Massachusetts folks are puzzled or angry or befuddled by the Bay State’s decision to jump on the “National Educational Standards” bandwagon – an effort to make us all one big, happy family of aspiring scholars, evaluated in the same way, using the same assessment tools, whether you live in Boston or Boise.

The question, which had no easy answer, was whether Massachusetts would be dumbing down its assessment, by agreeing to cavort in the same assessment playground as, God forbid, Mississippi or Arkansas. As a school district committee member from Brookfield put it, “Massachusetts students fare better on classic achievement tests than students from any other state, so why should we want to go backwards?”

The subtext of the national initiative is if we impose an assessment dictatorship on everyone, life will be good, in the aggregate, whether or not Massachusetts must back off a bit from its educational perfection.

The folks perhaps best at making some sense of all this may be the admissions officers at snobby colleges and universities. If the pool of applicants attended exclusive prep schools, “assessment” quality is irrelevant. But what of the earnest, “high-achieving,” lower-middle-class urban or suburban kid from a middling kind of state, in a school system that may or may not be up to snuff?

In the throes of “diversity” fever, both racial and socio-economic, the Harvards and Yales of this world must “assess” by some magical technique that doesn’t depend on whether the cannon fodder has been endorsed by MCAS.

The complicating factor in all this is whether in fact the consumers, the customers, the parents and kids, are dissatisfied with the quality and assessment tools in use by their states. A recent poll by MassINC Polling Group of voters in many of the Massachusetts basket-case school districts found most folks to be satisfied with the local schools. Multiply that by thousands of school districts nationwide, and the groundswell for national assessment may be nonexistent.

No Agreement

Another potential hiccup in the national assessment premise is that – in a sprawling, diverse, complex, fiercely independent nation, populated with tens of thousands of independent, idiosyncratic state and local educational bureaucracies and school boards – we can create a curriculum bland enough to bring everyone up to snuff, according to a national standard of…what, exactly?

A new study in the Journal of Research in Rural Education found that graduates of rural high schools earn fewer math credits, enter high school with a bit less math aptitude – and have less access to Advanced Placement math classes. Are we at risk of losing a potential Einstein to the allure of the cow pasture? Should it be our national strategy to guarantee every kid in rural America a math curriculum on a par with Boston and Cambridge? Or, do we shrug and conclude that those rural kids learn how and why to castrate male hogs that are causing a fuss in the pen – a biology lesson no one in Brookline will ever learn.

To be fair, the “national assessment” people are not promising equality of achievement across the land. What they suggest is that equality of assessment is a worthwhile objective, whether or not the subsequent results are stellar.

Of course, the advocates for a single assessment tool want the Unwashed Masses to rise up as one and demand a consistent level and quantity of wonderful educational product.

That’s unlikely. As any corporate creature that has gone through the pain of “competitive intelligence” analysis can tell you, in the end, you pick your fights and play to your strengths.