Will Common Core Standards Improve Education?

Advocates for the Common Core and Smarter Balanced educational initiatives are right to be concerned that the parent Opt Out movement could influence the policy’s chances for success.  On the other hand, parents have warrant to be concerned about educational policies that are as consequential, on the one hand, and poorly supported by research, on the other.  As a parent, I have decided to opt my children out of SBAC testing, both because I feel the tests are harmful to them individually, but in the broader picture, harmful to education as a whole.  As a doctoral student in educational leadership, I belatedly started to review the foundational research underlying Common Core/SBAC and have been startled to find that wherever I dig, I find huge holes in the claims made by Common Core proponents.

The main rationale of Common Core advocates is that this set of standards will ultimately lead to improved student achievement.  It seems to make sense that better standards, if we assume that they are better, will lead to better outcomes.  Unfortunately, the research base for this claim does not exist.  Harvard researcher Joshua Goodman noted in a 2012 paper that “over the last couple of decades, changes in the quality of state standards have had little impact on overall student achievement.” 

I looked into Goodman’s conclusion and found not only is there little impact, there is often a negative correlation. The Thomas Fordham Institute (TFI) publishes a report called the “State of the State Standards.”  I compared states receiving high grades, “Honor Roll states,” to those receiving low grades, labeled “irresponsible,” in the TFI 2000 reports.  Honor Roll states as a group underperformed “Irresponsible” states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). 

For example, on the 2000 4^th Grade Math NAEP, fourth graders in two of five states scored at or above the national average.  In comparison, fourth graders from 13 of 16 “irresponsible” states were at or above the national average.  If it were true that strong standards and strong standards, then we would expect the opposte of what we find.  The figure below demonstrates this.

Tracking scores over time did not help the cause. Some states that had high standards in 2000, such as Kansas or North Carolina, were downgraded to low quality in 2006 but did substantially better than Honor Roll states maintaining high quality standards.  Irresponsible Iowa had no standards and a weak accountability system, yet outperformed all the Honor Roll states in 2000 and again in 2013.  The figure below shows how states performed in 2006, still classified according the 2000 ratings.  We would hypothesize that if strong standards and strong accountability work together to produce positive results, we ought to see it in that six year time span.  Let's see:

As you can see, not a whole lot of difference.  The highest performing states are still the weak test-weak accountability states.  But, wait, hold on, so we have to consider also that many states changed their standards between 2000 and 2006.  Also, TFI introduced more stringent scoring rubrics, so the grades shifted somewhat.  What happens when we look at what happened when states changed their standards?

To point out a few of the main points n this figure, first in states that adopted weaker standards, there is mostly no change in performance on the NAEP relative to the rest of the country.  Two states did lose ground, Arizona and Oklahoma, both of which were classified as having strong standards in 2000 but only mediocre standards in 2006.  However, several states actually improved their standing, including South Carolina which went from strong to weak standards.  Delaware and Texas also improved during the 2000 to 2006 interval.  A second point is that if you look at the states that did not experience a change in the standards rating, there is a stark difference between the weak standards states and the strong standards states.  The states are arranged from weak to strong, so you can visually see that the states do worse when the standards are judged to be stronger.  Finally, again there was little change in states that adopted stronger standards. The main difference is that Michigan scored above the national average in 2000 and less in 2006.  The only change being negative evidence for the influence of standards.

Goodman cautioned that “researchers and educational policymakers should be thinking quite carefully about the role that standards play in influencing student achievement.”  Unfortunately, most educational policymakers rushed into adopting Common Core and accepted uncritically the premises often articulated by its proponents.  I have noticed a plethora of buzzwords and phrases that advocates repeat to mollify parents and school boards who lack the background to independently question the assertions.  These phrases include: “internationally benchmarked,” “deeper thinking instead of rote memorization,” “career and college readiness,” “more rigorous.”  Each of these assertions is based on either flawed assumptions or simply nothing at all.

For example, proponents claim that the new standards eliminate “rote memorization.”  Yet the 1998 TFI standards report criticized standards existing at that time for containing “false doctrines” like discouraging the “memorization of certain elementary processes…[S]tudents are…urged to discover truths that took humanity centuries to elucidate.”  The TFI described two other false doctrines: emphases on “real world applications” and “the notion that a mathematical question may have a multitude of different valid answers.”  All three “false doctrines” identified by TFI in 1998 are now encouraged in the Common Core math approach, advocated by TFI.  We need Common Core? Wait fifteen years and see which way the wind blows.

Parents have reason for concern. If they aren’t concerned, they aren’t paying close enough attention.  Claims made by Common Core advocates are often empty or go beyond the research base. Given no options to democratically oppose Common Core, the only action available to parents is to refuse to participate in SBAC testing.  The push for the adoption of Common Core and its corresponding testing regime does not seem to be motivated by the need for better standards.  So far, I can only conclude that this is about removing education from local control.

If you want to see a real impact on student achievement, forget standards and state tests, there isn't a more clear relationship than this:

In the figure above, I arranged all the states with 2000 NAEP math scores according to their poverty rates.  As you can see, states that score below the national average are those with the highest poverty rates.  I checked another comparison year, 2007, results are below: