Laura H. Chapman is a frequent contributor to the blog and a curriculum consultant in the arts.
Shortly after releasing the Standards with much publicity about international benchmarking, the CCSSO helped to fund a study that shows the Standards are not, in fact, closely aligned with the standards of nations that score higher on international tests.
In mathematics, for example, the nations with the highest test scores—Finland, Japan, and Singapore—devote about 75% of instruction to “perform procedures” compared to the CCSS emphasis at about 38%.
These same nations give almost no attention to “solve non-routine problems” compared to the CCSS.
In ELA, countries that score at the highest level also have patterns of emphasis in different grade spans that differ substantially from the CCSS, with a greater emphasis overall on “perform procedures” than in the CCSS.
The big surprise is that a significant part of “perform procedures” in mathematics and ELA is following directions and completing highly conventional assignments, free of elaborated analysis and generalization.
In other words, compliance with the conventions of schooling has a strong association with higher test scores. Wowzie. Who would have guessed that learning to follow directions mattered so much?
Note also that the former president of the American Educational Research Association, Andrew Porter, was among others who did this study and made the connection of the CCSS to the “new US intended curriculum. See: Porter, A.; McMaken ,J.; Hwang, J. ; & Yang, R. (2011). Common core standards: The new U.S. intended curriculum. Educational Researcher, 40(3). 103-116. DOI: 10.3102/0013189X11405038
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This kind of comparison seems like a very fruitful way of undermining the credibility of the CCSS and their creators. I hope you keep at it, Laura! The CCSS seem so faux-authoritative. Lacking experience, wisdom, erudition and a holistic sense of how kids’ minds learn and work, these geniuses grasped at a few promising sounding practices–close reading, supporting your arguments with evidence, writing about math –and made these fragmentary ideas the DNA of a whole new national curriculum. A mutant curriculum –a Franken-curriculum. Odds are an untested scheme like this will fail. But the scheme is plausible-sounding enough to pull the wool over the eyes of Bill Bennett and Bill Gates. Those of us who’ve actually taught, read a lot about education and come to understand that so many trends in education turn out to be frauds feel very queasy about this project. Education, like religion, is fertile territory for charlatans because its content is invisible and hard to measure. The student’s brain is a black box and any claim you make about what it needs, what is has and what it has been turned into is very hard to disprove. So edu-charlatans, like Coleman, flourish, and –I’m afraid –will continue to flourish. Our profession is plagued by charlatans of many stripes.
Is there a link to this study? I have a few people I want to show this to…
Just found this. You are not the only person interested in the study
owaascd.org/files/8813/2543/…/CommonCoreResearch010112.pdf
Yes, CCSS is fraudulent. CCSS is part of all the deforms designed to attack public education, teachers, keep parents ignorant as well as the general population…FOR PROFIT at any cost. Education, according to the pundits, is just a BUSINESS and bottom line is PROFIT. Really. How sad and stupid.
I’m not sure what this report means. I think we have always known that the education systems in many other countries tend to rely on more rote learning than has ever been common in schools in the U.S. It is a joke that CCSS claims to be internationally benchmarked with systems that have reputations of being far more rote. With the emphasis that is placed on problem solving (however poorly executed) there appears to be a logical disconnect. There was a balance between procedures and problem solving that I think we used to do pretty well (if we correct for poverty) before the reform movement gained steam. I would contend that this balance contributed to the reputation the U.S. has had for innovation and creativity.
“Common core standards: The new U.S. intended curriculum.”
And as with all curricula, many times it is the unintended curricula that ends up holding sway.