The Common Core Initiative, a nationwide panel of educators tasked with formulating year-by-year curriculum standards, to be adopted by the whole country, today released their standards for math and language (they didn't do science, probably so that god wouldn't smite them down before they could finish). You can read them on the Initiative's website.

If a majority of states adopt them, they'll become standard nationwide—a major step forward, as you'll agree if you remember your belligerently ass-backwards local school board, or college courses designed to streamline an incoming freshman prepared or unprepared for an undergraduate education to wildly divergent degrees. (It's an outline of concepts and skills, not a proscription of teaching methods or reading lists.)

The nation's governors and their school superintendents began the project in the first half of last year; 48 states participated. The two that didn't, as I'm sure you can imagine, were Alaska and Texas. Rather than surrender their children's minds to the Big Bad Federal Government, with its gentle suggestion that middle schoolers read Little Women, noted aspiring populist demagogues (and secessionists, both of them) Sarah Palin and Rick Perry boldly stood up for the independent Alaskan/Texan Way of Life, defying government intervention, with its pernicious basic efficiency standards and commonsensical socially accepted life skills.