This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

With any luck, all of us are held, or hold ourselves, to high standards in school, at work, in the home.

So it's bewildering why certain elements of Utah's culture are in rabid opposition to the Common Core academic standards, being developed by educators in 45 states and three U.S. territories.

That's educators, not the federal government and not state legislators, a fact that can just drive many lawmakers crazy.

Predictably, the charge against Common Core is being led by the Utah Eagle Forum, the Sutherland Institute and Standard of Liberty, a small operation that heretofore has focused on the evils of being gay.

Common Core focuses on math and language arts and aspires to a portability that would let a student move from one state to another, equipped with a rigorous education in those areas. It follows, then, that students can move from high school to higher education or training and ultimately to meaningful careers.

It just makes sense: educators, businesspeople and researchers — all invested in an educated workforce — join together to help shape and polish the standards.

The federal government is not, contrary to some of the opposition's claims, involved in setting those standards. There are no "standards police" insisting that one state should implement its standards in the same way another state does.

What all the involved states need to do, however, is to make sure their public education meets a level of rigor that others have — again, with the goal of teaching children what they need to know in an increasingly competitive global workplace. That's why it's called a common core.

It's a difficult but doable task for Utah's teachers, who are embracing higher standards and whose feedback and input is priceless, says Sharon Gallagher-Fishbaugh, president of the Utah Education Association and a grade school teacher for more than 30 years.

It's also, she says, a means to promote professional development for the teachers to whom parents entrust their children.

Gallagher-Fishbaugh is disappointed that the state school board voted last week to drop out of a Common Core consortium that's developing tests based on the academic standards. Yet again, it was a decision championed by the Eagle Forum, which also wants Utah to drop out of Common Core altogether.

Now, I'm a product of Utah public schools, starting in the seventh grade. I could always read pretty much everything I wanted to, although to this day I need a calculator to do simple arithmetic. My daughter, on the other hand, got a very good public education here and graduated with honors from a California university.

If I were the mother of a grade-school kid today, I would want the most rigorous standards possible. That's what Common Core is all about, despite the scorn heaped upon it by arch-conservatives and the public servants they try to and sometimes do control.

The Utah Constitution places the "general control and supervision of the public education system" with the State Board of Education. That never stops lawmakers, though, from tinkering. Remember Rep. Bill Wright's anti-sex-ed bill last session? And it was only one of dozens.

Utah has well over 500,000 children in public schools and more than 26,000 teachers. Now, who is best prepared to develop top-flight standards? The experts. The teachers.

Peg McEntee is a news columnist. Reach her at pegmcentee@sltrib.com, facebook.com/pegmcentee and Twitter, @pegmcentee.