What do you do when students do everything right, and their teachers do everything right, and it isn’t enough? When students get to college and discover they need to take remedial courses because doing everything right—doing what their school required—didn’t adequately prepare them for college or for a career?

Imagine moving to a new state and finding out that your child—who was ahead of the class where you came from—is now behind it, because your new home state has more rigorous standards. Or, worse, what if the academic expectations in your new state are far lower?

To millions of parents and children, this is happening right now. Standards are too low, too diffuse, too confusing, and they vary from state to state.

About 60 percent of students beginning community college need to take at least one remedial class. These classes are expensive, and students who need them are more likely to drop out of college. Odds are, if you start in a remedial class, you will never finish a credit-bearing course in that subject.

That’s why, when it comes to standards, we need to abandon the prevailing attitude of “the more, the better,” and instead aim for:

• Standards that reflect what the evidence shows is most essential.
• Standards that teachers and students can master with the time and resources they have.
• Standards that foster engagement and innovation, inspire teachers, motivate students, and help parents support their kids at home.
• Standards that demand mastery of what matters, not asking students to learn less and less about more and more.
• Standards that can evolve as we learn what works and what doesn't.

Over the past few years, states have come together to take on this challenge. Working with parents, teachers, education experts, and researchers, and under the leadership of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, they’ve assembled the next generation of standards in math and language arts. What they’ve come up with is a set of consistent standards that are both clear enough and high enough to prepare all students for success.

To date, 48 states and the District of Columbia have pledged to incorporate these standards, which are available today at www.corestandards.org. This release marks the end of the development phase of the Common Core State Standards and the beginning of the adoption process within individual states.

Consistent standards will take effect only if everyone from policy-makers to parents recognizes their importance and gets behind them. Only when we set academic standards like these, and then work to ensure that all students can meet and exceed them, will we know that every child who graduates from high school will be prepared to succeed in college, career, and life.