"A lot of people have been talking about this issue for quite a few years," said Eric Hirsch, a senior policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures, who tracks education issues.
"Apart from the international recognition of qualifications, safety is the students' primary concern," said Adrian Mitchell, head of research for Hobsons, a London company that tracks education trends, summarizing a recent report it produced.
"All these problems are at least indirectly related to money, and the shortage of money over a sequence of decades," said Barbara Miller, research director of Ed Source, a nonpartisan research group that tracks education issues in California.
While standardized tests are here to stay, primarily because they are a necessary way to track education, stronger teacher input is needed in their composition, in the skills to be tested, and in how they are to be graded and used.
A new survey by the Education Commission of the States, a non-partisan organization that tracks education policy, shows that many states have ditched the "Common Core" name but have kept the standards and slapped on a new moniker that doesn't carry as much political freight.
Sixteen other states and the District of Columbia require kindergarten, according to data from the Education Commission of the States, a research group that tracks education policy.
"There's more that we don't know than what we do know," said Jennifer Thomsen, policy director at Education Commission of the States, an organization that tracks education policy and offers advice to state legislators.
Other applications include EduTrac, which tracks education indicators to help inform decision-making at all levels of the education system; and Project Mwana used in Zambia to deliver HIV test results, cutting turnaround time in half, from 66 days to 33.
Professor John Howson of Oxford University has been tracking the education labour force for 25 years.
It is often said a manager learns more in the bad times than the good, in which case Crawley Town's Richie Barker is currently receiving a fast-track education.
