Should Mississippi and Louisiana students be held to a different set of education standards than say students from California or Colorado?

If you believe all students are not created equally, then perhaps you’re an opponent of Common Core State Standards.

If that’s the case, your mind likely is made up, so you might want to simply stop reading and go bury your head in the sand again.

That kind of myopic thinking doesn’t work in a global environment in which children educated in Adams County and Concordia Parish compete for jobs with cohorts from Beijing and Mumbai.

The Common Core standards aim to set a common benchmark by which all American students are judged. The problem is perhaps none of us wants to admit that all students at the moment are not on the same playing field. That reality has made the standard become a lightning rod for bitterly divided factions in the country.

No set of standards or attempts to benchmark students is perfect.

But to discount the effort entirely is tantamount to giving up on our children, throwing up our hands and going home.

What matters to our children — whether those children are related to us by blood or the geographic DNA of sharing common soil — is that the adults care enough about our nation’s future to simply not give up on them, but to invest in them and believe they can do better.

Common Core measures are one path to raising the bar of education in this country by — at the very least — ensuring we’re all measuring that education by using the same ruler.