The joint decision last week by the state Department of Education, the Council on Postsecondary Education, and the Education Professional Standards Board to adopt the "Common Core State Standards Initiative" was an historic moment and a watershed in the long journey of education reform.
Kentucky became the first state in the nation to endorse the common standards, leading a collaborative of 48 states working together to bring clarity to the often-conflicting and murky world of what schools are supposed to teach and what students are supposed to learn by when.
The idea is to spell out more clearly what students need to know to succeed in college and at work as the foundation for aligning K-12 and postsecondary education -- a foundational step essential to move the needle on education attainment, the first Deep Driver of Change for the push to move Louisville into the top tier among its peer cities.
The work of aligning courses and curricula will flow from that decision with the goal of establishing consistent standards across the whole education pipeline. It also will lead to a new set of tests that will allow for valid comparisons across states for the first time. That, too, would be a milestone.
Like so much else in the long journey of education reform, these steps look like a long-awaited breakthrough, as is the unprecedented partnership being demonstrated between Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday, Bob King, who oversees the state's colleges and universities at CPE.
"We are thrilled," King said after the joint meeting. "What all of this is about, when you boil it all down, is aligning what youngsters are learning in the K-12 system so that when they come to the universities and community colleges they arrive without the need for remediation."
It's a development and a positive trend to track closely given the importance of raising education attainment in our city and our state.