Why Common Core Failed
Contents
Article Link
- Common core has been a standard for 10 years
- No convincing evidence that it has had a significant positive impact on student achievement
- This article is a summary of the author's forthcoming book: Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core
- The failure of Common Core can only be understood in the context of the theory of standards-based reform
The Theory of Standards-Based Reform
- Standards based reform has the following premises:
- Ambitious standards should be written first
- These standards should then guide the development of other components
- Curriculum
- Instruction
- Assessment
- Accountability
- This approach avoids the "fragmentation" and "incoherence" that were the presumptive cause of the failure of previous reform efforts
- Top-down, regulatory approach
- Standards determined by policy experts
- Other components, however, are controlled by practitioners downstream
- Standards-based reform doesn't usually work well in practice
- Attempting to force top-down coordination hamstrings practitioners and reduces individual teachers' discretion in customizing their instruction styles
- The assumption of Common Core is that differences in outcomes are due to differences of standards
- If we raise standards and expectations, students will catch up, or at least, won't fall behind further
High Expectations Are Not Enough
- The above premise is wrong
- Systemic improvements do not result from high expectations alone
- The best predictor of how much students will learn tomorrow is how much they know today
- Ratcheting up expectations without regard for prior knowledge leads to inevitable disappointment
- Common Core is not the first example of this — we saw the same failure with "Algebra For All" in the early 2000s
- The cause of educational disparities is not low standards
- The reading ability of children entering kindergarten spans almost 5 years
- Good readers are reading at the ability of the average 9-year-old
- Poor readers can barely recognize letters
- If there is this much inequality at the starting gate, disparate outcomes cannot be the result of inadequate expectations
Standards As Written, Standards As Implemented
- Standards pass through many organizational layers, each of which put their stamp on the end product
- Each transition allows reinterpretation
- Example: reading instruction
- Common Core standards tried to forge a compromise between sound-symbol based learning and comprehension based learning
- However, in practice, sound-symbol based learning got short shrift and almost all instruction was observed to be comprehension based, even when in situations where comprehension-based learning had been proven to be ineffective
Political Cover
- Local officials use standards as cover to push through unpopular policies
- Math reformers have long been pushing for an integrated math approach, where algebra, geometry and statistics are combined as opposed to being taught in separate classes
- Common core recognized both traditional and integrated math tracks as equivalent
- As a result, it gave many state governments the excuse to push through transitions to integrated math, even though the vast majority of students and parents were enrolled in traditional math courses
- As support for Common Core has declined, so has support for integrated math
Are Educators Simply Reluctant To Change
- Often, one hears that the reason that reforms are unsuccessful is because of individual practitioners' traditionalism and resistance to change
- This does not appear to be the case with Common Core
- A lot of money has been spent developing new curricula and training teachers for Common Core
- In addition, Common Core was implemented at a time when a generational shift in teaching was occurring - Baby Boomer teachers were retiring and were being replaced by younger teachers
- In the next few years, teachers who have taught nothing but Common Core will outnumber teachers who have had experience with other standards
The Future
- The pandemic has placed education reform on hold, as schools deal with the disruption of school closures and reopening
- We shouldn't replace Common Core with a new set of top-down standards
- We need to invest significant resources to improve the basic science of education
- Discover new teaching methods that boost learning
My Thoughts
- Every time I think I understand how incredibly Marxist the US education system is, it surprises me by being more Marxist than I could imagine
- The rollout of Common Core resembles a Soviet 5-Year-Plan more than anything else in the US
- The idea that individual practitioners stymie reform efforts is precisely analogous to the idea that the only reason the goals of 5-Year-Plans aren't achieved is because of "wreckers" and "imperialist saboteurs"
- The failure of Common Core ought to have been apparent to anyone who has a passing familiarity with Seeing Like A State
- As a victim of "integrated math", if Common Core drags integrated math down with it in its death throes, there will have been a silver lining to this whole mess
- As much as I agree with Loveless' description of the problem, I'm not sure that his proposed solutions will actually work
- I don't think there is a silver bullet teaching technique out there that can address the disparity between students
- Whether you chalk it up to systemic socioeconomic disparities or genetic disparities due to IQ, the fact is that there are wide and persistent gaps between the abilities of students when they enter school
- As long as educational reformers ignore the fact that different students have different abilities, reform will be doomed to failure
- We should accept that it will either
- Take some students longer than 12 years to achieve what we deem to be a minimum level of educational attainment or
- That students will leave high school with disparate levels of educational attainment
- Maybe Lenin had it backwards — it doesn't take a communist utopia to produce a New Soviet Man, it takes a New Soviet Man to produce a communist utopia
- Thus the real solution for this problem (as with all other problems) is free genehacking clinics for all
