How would you solve this equation? For most of us, it's
as simple as following a series of familiar steps to get us to
that answer. Now, remember this. This is how students under
Common Core were taught to solve the exact same question. First
adopted in 2009, Common Core was an ambitious initiative to
revolutionize the American education system. 41 states, the
District of Columbia and four territories signed up to
participate. National leaders from Bill Gates to President
Obama supported the idea of the common curriculum, and it cost
an estimated $15.8 billion to implement.
They thought standards were just too low in the US, and that we
could have kids learn more in school if we raise standards.
Quite frankly, they didn't really trust the schools to do
this on their own.
One of the most challenging aspects was we understood our
curriculum, and we were basically thrown a curveball
into what it was, and had to really adopt new practices.
But a couple of years after its launch, it was met with
confusion and ridicule.
Some of the math items that were mocked, I think, deserve to be
mocked. Frankly, they were just very poor items.
People deserve to know the truth, but it wasn't the truth.
I was 15 in 1977, and I'll be 30 next week. I don't think that
math checks out, I don't get math. I went to school in the
2000s, and we were taught Common Core.
All of a sudden, parents were having to help their kids with
math homework, that they couldn't quite grasp because
they hadn't been taught math that way.
So how can the US fix our lagging school system? Can a
common curriculum work?
The Common Core is a set of standards specifically designed
to better prepare American students for success in college
and their workplace. These standards determine what a
student should know and be able to do in language arts and math
from kindergarten through senior year of high school.
When you should know algebra, should it be eighth grade?
Should it be ninth grade? Should you be capable of doing algebra
one or algebra two? You know, when would it be appropriate to
move into calculus, things of that nature.
It's important to have a standard because you have to
have a clear vision or goal of where you're going. And what it
is that you expect for your students to be able, what output
do you expect from them. I think that if you go in without any
expectations for your students, they themselves are going to be
unclear, right? What it is that they are showing up to school
every single day to achieve.
Besides setting these benchmarks, Common Core also
brought changes to how students were taught.
There definitely was a shift, especially in just your thought
and thinking about how you approach lesson plans, and how
you are going to make sure that you are disseminating the
information in a way to your students that they can receive
it.
Do you know the Pythagorean Theorem, right? Like, okay, a
squared plus b squared equals c squared, you can probably ask
any adult and they can shoot that back to you. It was more
about, if you have that knowledge, if you understand
what it is, where do you use that? How do you apply it?
On the language arts side, there was much more of a focus on
moving a little bit away from fiction to much more focus on
the critical thinking using real live documents like studying
Hamilton papers or something like that, to really understand
what was going on at that time of the revolution.
There were two main reasons why the initiative received so much
support in its early years. The first was fear that America was
lagging behind other countries in academic performance. In
2009, the US showed middling performance in reading and
science and scored below average in mathematics, compared to the
average score among OECD countries.
The idea was we're gonna hold schools responsible for teaching
to a higher level, and then test kids to see whether or not
they've attained that higher level.
The second reason was that the Common Core allowed different
states to accurately compare their academic performances by
having a uniform standard for education.
And while one state might now say we're doing a great job of
achieving our standards, but the standards are very low. And
another state is saying, yeah, we're not doing as well as we'd
like to be doing and achieving our standards, but they're very
high. This makes for a confusing conversation.
With these intentions in mind, two nonprofit groups, The
Council of Chief State School Officers and the National
Governors Association developed the standards. Achieve, a
nonprofit education reform group, as well as various
teachers unions, including the National Education Association
and the American Federation of Teachers joined in to help the
process.
So when they got together in 2009, what they did first is
they had a memorandum of understanding that they had
states sign on to and it basically said, okay, we're
gonna go write these standards. You don't have to accept them
now, but can you at least say you'll be interested in looking
at them and might accept them down the road if you find them
to meet your needs. And over 45 states signed on to that
memorandum of understanding.
We made sure that we were having K 12 teachers talk to freshmen,
sophomore professors to make sure we knew what postsecondary
was expecting, and making sure we build on those expectations
from K through 12.
Since Common Core was a state led initiative, the federal
government did not play a major role in developing the
standards. However, it did play a role in promoting them. The
Obama administration's Race to the Top fund offered $4.35
billion in grants for states agreeing to adopt any college
and career ready standards.
We will end what has become a race to the bottom in our
schools and instead spur a race to the top by encouraging better
standards and assessments. This is an area where we are being
outpaced by other nations. It's not that their kids are any
smarter than ours, it's that they are being smarter about how
to educate their children.
In fact, we were hitting bottom in 2009, 2010, in the Great
Recession. And so states were desperate for money, the Obama
administration put together a recovery package for the states.
But one of the requirements was they had to have adopted College
and Career Readiness Standards, which is a code word for Common
Core. This was seen as Obama administration support for
Common Core, and that's not an unfair accusation.
Facing minimal resistance, it seemed as though Common Core
would be a guaranteed success.
We had a meeting in 2010 to have all the entities sign off on the
adoption of the Common Core. We had unanimous across the state
agreement, because so many Kentucky teachers had been
involved and giving feedback and writing the standards.
But a couple of years later, things took a turn as the
efficacy of the new standard came into question. It also
didn't help that the Common Core became the subject of ridicule
by parents and the media unfamiliar with the concepts
taught under the new standard.
A lot of parents were getting homework that came home that
they just didn't understand. They thought it was bizarre.
I went through Common Core with my kids. And I remember looking
at my daughter and going I'm not entirely clear why what you're
doing. So I'm just going to show you long division the way I know
it.
It wasn't until a decade later that federally funded research
was conducted to find out what the impact of Common Core had on
students performance over time, the results were disappointing.
The studies ranged from tiny negative effects to tiny
positive effects and a lot of neutral effects in the middle.
So the one thing we can be pretty certain of is that Common
Core did not have a dramatic impact on student achievement
the United States.
Did we raise standards? Yes, we did. Did we raise expectations
on assessments? Yes, we did. Have we improved student
performance? No.
There are numerous theories as to why the Common Core has
failed to improve student performance. But the most
popular theory is that the standards took away the control
from teachers who always have a better understanding of what
their students need.
The idea that you could dictate curriculum to a teacher or
dictate instruction to a teacher from kind of remote control,
from up above and say, well, here, here it is, that you're
going to teach. It's simply unrealistic.
Kids are not cogs in a machine. So we say something is going to
happen in third grade, but realistically, for some kids, it
happened in second grade. And for some kids, it's not going to
happen till fifth grade. The Common Core made that really
hard. It really drew a huge spotlight that all kids aren't
going to learn things in the same path and really started to
mark that as success versus failure.
Another theory is that those who wrote the standards didn't take
into account the financial difficulties of students across
America. Studies have shown time after time that children who
grow up poor are more likely to have poor academic achievement
and drop out of high school. Roughly 10 point 5 million
children lived in poverty in the US.
A lot of children's needs are not being met within the four
walls of their school building. And I think that we see that
that deficit is even larger for students from low income
families or we have students of color.
As a country we just have not committed to the underlying
problem of student performance, and that is poverty.
Today, Common Core has fallen out of favor more than 20 of the
initial 45 states have either repealed, revised or edited the
standards. Four states, including Arizona, Oklahoma,
Indiana and South Carolina have entirely withdrawn from the
initiative. Former Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, went as
far as to call it a disaster, concluding that the Common Core
is dead at the federal level.
I think you are seeing today what kids experience in
curriculum kind of is a little bit more blended. It's not the
holistic approach that maybe Common Core introduced when we
kind of swung completely to that continuum, and parents would
look at their children's, you know, third grade homework and
go, I don't get it.
I don't think Common Core as such has a future honestly now.
It was a movement at a particular time. It, it reached
its heyday when we have widespread adoption. And as I
said, then there was a retreat from that adoption, many of the
states have held on substantively to elements of
that Common Core. But we've moved on.
A few states have also developed a new educational standard as a
replacement. On February 12 2020, Florida officially adopted
the Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking, or the BEST
Standards as a replacement for the Common Core. While New York
has developed its own the Next Generation Learning Standards
that are expected to be implemented by September 2022.
Some, however, argue that none of the newer standards would
have been possible without the work of Common Core.
The standards that the states have come up with, where they
claim they were different from Common Core, they're really not
that much different. In fact, some states just basically took
the Common Core label off and then slap the new label on the
package.
So the Common Core is not going to go anywhere. I feel confident
in saying that, what I think is probably going to happen is the
continued evolution of the implementation of the Common
Core. So the standards themselves will probably
continue to exist and be anchors for our practice.
What both supporters and the opponents of the original
standard do agree on, is that Common Core was an initiative
doomed to fail from the start, mainly due to its
politicalization.
There were people who oppose standardized testing, they tend
to be on the political left, they didn't like the Common Core
test. It was this left right coalition that really doomed
Common Core politically, it wasn't necessarily evidence
coming out that Common Core was effective or not effective.
Once it became politicized, then all bets were off, states that
have adopted it began to retreat, people began to relabel
their standards, even if they were essentially the same
standards, they didn't want the label Common Core because that
had become politicized and identified with a political
party or political leader, and the thing began to fall apart.
While the Biden administration has not yet explicitly commented
on the matter, experts believe that the federal government will
continue to not involve themselves in the future of
educational standards.
I don't think you're gonna see the Biden administration
enthusiastically embrace Common Core.
But experts assure that education in the United States
will continue to improve as long as there are those who believe
in the importance of education.
The future of education is extraordinary. And it's
extraordinarily important, because what we need to
recognize is that education is the asset our community is built
upon it's the thing that we invest in to ensure community
growth.
It matters whether they learn it or they don't, and if they're
not learning it as an individual student, or as a subgroup of
students, then we have an obligation as the adults in
America to do what we can to bring them up to the standard
because the standard is ultimately what they need to
survive and thrive in this economy, which is ultimately
what we as a society and as a nation, need if we're gonna
survive and thrive as a democracy and as a 21st century
international economy.