President Obama unveiled his Race to
the Top initiative in 2009, the idea was to award $4.35 billion in federal
grant money to states to replicate policies that boosted student
achievement. That quickly changed and the federal money was instead used
to persuade states to adopt administration-backed nationalized K-12 English and
math standards and tests. By last year, most states had adopted the standards,
known as Common Core, and it seemed a foregone conclusion that the United
States would join countries like France in having a uniform curriculum.
But what a difference a year
makes. Today, a full-blown epidemic of buyer’s remorse has taken hold.
Popular resistance is rampant and bills to pull out of Common Core are making
their way through multiple state legislatures.
Had the Obama administration been
interested in policies with a proven record of improving students’ academic
performance, it would have looked to Massachusetts. In the early 1990s,
Massachusetts was an above average but unremarkable performer on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and SATs. After enactment of
the Bay State’s landmark 1993 education reform law, SAT scores rose for 13
consecutive years. In 2005, Massachusetts students became the first state
ever to score best in the nation in all four categories on the NAEP’s fourth
and eighth grade reading and math assessments. The next three times the
tests were administered—in 2007, 2009, and 2010—this feat was repeated.
While American students as a whole
lag their international peers, the 2007 “Trends in International Math and
Science Study” showed Massachusetts students to be competitive with
top-performing nations like Japan, Korea, and Singapore. With the Bay
State’s eighth graders tying for first in the world in science, it could truly
be said to be one of the few states to have answered the alarm bell of the
Reagan administration’s 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report, which declared that,
“the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by
a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future.”
Other states, such as Florida, claim
to have developed reform models that work. But while they have shown good (though
inconsistent) improvement, their performance remains below average on national
tests and downright dismal on international assessments.
Given this record, you might expect
strong commonality between what Massachusetts did and what the U.S. Department of
Education was trying to advance. But it would be hard to imagine an
approach that has less in common with the Bay State’s than the one promoted by
Race to the Top.
The most obvious difference is that
Massachusetts’s success was built upon a relentless focus on academics,
specifically on literacy, math, and the liberal arts. Common Core emphasizes
experiential, skills-based learning while reducing the amount of classic
literature, poetry, and drama taught in English classes. Its more
vocational bent includes far greater emphasis on jargon-laden “informational
text” extracts, and it supports analyzing texts shorn of historical context and
background knowledge.
The
impact on English classrooms in Massachusetts, which adopted Common Core in
2010, has been to reduce the amount of classical literature studied by more
than half. Goodbye Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Arthur Conan Doyle,
and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
In math, consider the view of
Stanford University emeritus professor of mathematics James Milgram, the only
academic mathematician on Common Core’s validation committee. (He refused
to sign off on the final draft of the national standards.) He describes
the standards as having “extremely serious failings,” reflecting “very low expectations,” and
ultimately leaving American students one year behind their international peers
by fifth grade and two years behind by seventh grade.
One major practical effect is that
American students will not get to algebra I in eighth grade, which is critical
if our students are to be college-ready in mathematics.
Rather than learn from leading
states like Massachusetts, Common Core draws from the so-called “21st
century skills” movement, which elevates soft skills like global awareness,
media literacy, cross-cultural flexibility and adaptability, and creativity to
equal footing with academic content. This less academic approach has, in
fact, been road tested in places like Connecticut and West
Virginia. Predictably, the results have been dismal.
Back in 1998, Connecticut had higher
reading scores than Massachusetts. But just as the Bay State was adopting
clearly articulated academic goals, Connecticut opted for a
"hands-on," skills-based approach. By 2005, Massachusetts's scores
had jumped dramatically, and Connecticut was one of seven states experiencing
outsized drops in reading scores.
West Virginia’s was perhaps the most
enthusiastic embrace of 21st century skills. As Matthew
Ladner, a research scholar at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, has
demonstrated, its impact on poor students is deeply troubling. West
Virginia is the only state whose NAEP reading and math scores for students
eligible for free or reduced-price lunch fell between 2003 and 2009. The
major D.C.-based drivers of Common Core and national tests like the Council of
Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, Achieve, Inc.,
and the Obama administration all enthusiastically support 21st
century skills.
Common Core’s problems, however,
extend beyond academic deficiencies. No estimate was ever performed to
determine what it would cost to implement the new standards. In 2011,
Pioneer Institute commissioned the first independent, comprehensive cost study,
which showed that transitioning states to the new standards will be $16.7
billion, more than triple the amount of the federal Race to the Top
inducements. Massive technology upgrades, training and support, together with
the purchase of new textbooks and instructional materials, and professional
development account for most of the expense.
Most disturbing are serious
questions about Common Core’s legality. Three federal laws explicitly
prohibit the U.S. Department of Education from directing, supervising, or
controlling any nationalized standards, testing, or curriculum.
And yet Race to the Top favored a
state’s grant application if it adopted Common Core. The U.S. Department
of Education subsequently awarded $362 million to directly fund two national
testing consortia to develop common nationalized assessments. The consortia
funding application clearly state that they will use federal funds to develop
curriculum materials and to create a “model curriculum” and instructional
materials “aligned with” Common Core. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
himself noted that the consortia would develop “curriculum frameworks” and
“instructional modules.”
The Department of Education then
made adopting Common Core a condition for waivers from the No Child Left Behind
Act’s accountability provisions, even though the national standards have never
been approved by Congress and are, in fact, expressly prohibited by the 1965
Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which defined the federal
government’s role in K-12 education, the 1970 General Education Provisions Act,
and the 1979 law establishing the U.S. Department of Education.
It is worth reminding our friends
who call it a conservative policy that Common Core would have been a bridge too
far even for President Johnson, who signed the ESEA, and President Carter, who
signed the law creating the federal Department of Education. As
syndicated columnist George Will wrote last year about the push for Common
Core, “Here again laws are cobwebs. As government becomes bigger, it becomes
more lawless.”
The problems with what is now
federal policy are not lost on state and local leaders. In just the past
few weeks, Indiana lawmakers agreed to pause implementation of Common
Core. Ditto in Pennsylvania. Michigan’s House of Representatives voted to
defund the effort. And the national standards are under fire in Alabama,
Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Utah.
Nationally, the Republican National
Committee recently adopted an anti-Common Core resolution, but opposition is
bipartisan. Many Democrats are troubled that Common Core is not based on
research and ignores too much of what we know about how students learn.
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten recently told
the Washington Post, “Common Core is in trouble … There is a serious
backlash in lots of different ways, on the right and on the left.”
The backlash is richly deserved.
The Common Core standards are academically inferior to the standards they
replaced in high performing states; and they ignore empirical lessons of how
states like Massachusetts achieved historic successes. Neither local
leaders nor their constituents like having policies force fed by Washington,
especially when the new requirements amount to a massive, and possibly illegal,
unfunded mandate. Common Core’s troubles are just beginning.
Source:
The Weekly Standard Blog, 5:31 PM, May 29, 2013 Jim Stergios is executive director
of Pioneer Institute. Jamie Gass is director of the Pioneer Institute’s Center
for School Reform.
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