The odd theory of the Common Core standards is that if everyone has exactly the same curriculum and the same standards, everyone will learn the same “stuff” and progress at the same rate; and as a result, everyone will have the same results, and the achievement gap will close. If this were true, every child who had the same teachers and the same classes in the same school would have identical outcomes, but they don’t.
In 2012, Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution wrote an analysis of the Common Core standards and concluded that they would have little effect on achievement. Not because the standards are good or bad, but because standards alone don’t raise achievement, nor, I might add, do tests, which measure achievement, as thermometers measure body temperature without changing it.
Loveless summarizes his 2012 findings here.
He writes:
“The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education includes a study of the Common Core State Standards project. It attempts to predict the effect of the common core on student achievement. The study focuses on three arguments: that the quality of the common core is superior to that of existing standards, that the tests tied to the common core will be rigorous, and that having common standards will reduce differences across the United States by “putting all states on the same page.” It summarizes the current debate on the common core, but takes no stand on the merits of the arguments.
“For example, the study does not attempt to determine whether the common-core standards are of high or low quality, only whether the quality of state standards has mattered to student achievement in the past. The finding is clear: The quality of standards has not mattered. From 2003 to 2009, states with terrific standards raised their National Assessment of Educational Progress scores by roughly the same margin as states with awful ones.”
What about states that have common standards? “Test-score differences within states are about four to five times greater than differences in state means. We all know of the huge difference between Massachusetts and Mississippi on NAEP. What often goes unnoticed is that every state in the nation has a mini-Massachusetts-Mississippi contrast within its own borders. Common state standards might reduce variation between states, but it is difficult to imagine how they will reduce variation within states. After all, districts and schools within the same state have been operating under common standards for several years and, in some states, for decades.”
He concludes:
“Effectiveness, not alignment, should be the primary criterion for selecting curricula, disseminating promising instructional strategies, and pursuing all of the other implementation strategies on which common-core advocates are betting so much. They steadfastly believe that “effectiveness” and “alignment with standards” are synonymous. The empirical evidence indicates that they are not.
“On the basis of past experience with standards, the most reasonable prediction is that the common core will have little to no effect on student achievement.”
In his 2014 analysis of states that did and did not implement Common Core standards, Loveless found no reason to change his initial conclusion.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Saving school math and commented:
This much is so obvious, except to those who have no idea about teaching and learning. Pity they are the ones making the decisions.
@ howard:
You write that Loveless’ conclusions are obvious, “except to those who have no idea about teaching and learning. Pity they are the ones making the decisions.”
I’ve noted this again and again. Many of those who are “leaders” in the field of public education either have no clue or just go along with the current trend(s). Or – as Diane pointed out in a response to comment of mine on a different issue – they took money from Bill Gates or the feds and then did whatever the cash dictated. In essence, they sold out.
“Pity they are the ones making the decisions.”
Indeed.
Agreed on all points of both the original post and these replies. A subtle, but significant, difference between the current Reformist wave from past educational policy pushes was that leaders in the past would do everything they could to ensure proclaiming victory. In Ohio, when (back in the 90’s) scores were too low on the initial Ohio Graduation Tests, they simply lowered the passing scores (then, eventually added in gradations like “accelerated” and “advanced” to distinguish schools and scores). Current Reform — driven more by “accountability” than anything else — has a model that absolves leaders from any connection to poor performance. Only the outcry from parents — something these Reformers never anticipated — has forced them to have a semi-dependence upon the results. It is an incredibly cynical operation (for those old enough to remember the Eddie Murphy movie “Trading Places,” when I hear Bill Gates say we’ll know whether or not this succeeded in ten years, I’m reminded of the Duke brothers’ one-dollar bet). Seeing the influence of big money throughout this debate has impacted my perspective of our entire political system. It’s not just education that’s in trouble…
Agreed. This is why teachers just shut their classroom doors.
The trouble with the educational dilemma is if we were doing the ‘right’ this in public education, we would not be imposed upon to the degree we have today. Now here we are…we need to recognize the difference is going to be the magic that must occur in each classroom, each day, for each child. Until the politics leave the hiring practices, and we authentically move to focus on students, public schools are choosing to fail. There are too many egos at the administrative level without an authentic sense of what it means to challenge each student each day, and until that changes, legislatures can make the argument that we are failing.
Sorry Mike, but your analysis is reformy nonsense. You point out the same straw man flaws that we all know so well as nothing more than a sales pitch.
Honestly, I would think that raising standards too high for a given student would have a negative effect on achievement, by discouraging weaker students. The generally accepted idea in pedagogy is that material needs to be challenging, but within reach of the student at his or her current level of ability and proficiency. That’s why testing and instruction needs to be flexible, and not one size fits all. Just raising the bar to 8 feet for a child who can’t jump a 3 foot bar, in hopes they they will jump at least 5 feet doesn’t make any sense.
To expand on the setting a high bar imagery, one of my children did not walk before reaching 16 months. According to the “standards,” in today’s environment that performance would be a failure. As far as I can tell, that grown child has no difficulty with locomoting and leads an active, outdoor lifestyle. Go figure.
The idea of raising the bar to produce better results comes directly from manufacturing — along with the idea of reducing variation.
The goal is to produce widgets with high “quality’ (few “defects”) and very little variation.
It’s not surprising that this stuff makes no sense when applied to education.
Only a fool (or someone like Bill Gates, who is focused on standardizing students to create a uniform market for products) would think it would.
The whole premise of Common Core is the assertion we can use test scores to raise test scores.
I just think they have to stop telling people it isn’t all about the tests when it is CLEARLY all about the tests.
Here’s a celebrity ed reformer promising miracles as a result of these tests- not “the Common Core”- the tests:
“These new assessments have the power to revolutionize the quality of education in the United States. Since 2002, students have been taking statewide tests that were almost exclusively comprised of multiple-choice questions. These assessments were extremely limited in what they could measure.”
For people who tell us over and over that they don’t focus exclusively on testing, they sure focus exclusively on testing an awful lot.
One stops doing something when one STOPS doing it. It’s a new test but it’s the same 150 ed reform “movement” insiders and it’s the same mindset.
http://hechingerreport.org/new-tests-raise-the-bar-for-kids-and-thats-a-good-thing-whatever-the-scores/
This premise is exactly it. And we already know that test scores are not the
most accurate evaluation of learning and that wealthier parents can impact the
test scores, as has happened with SAT, through hired tutors and tutorial programs.
So instead of reducing class sizes to say 20 in high school, instead of head
start for students in areas of deprivation, instead of free tutorial programs–we
have more testing and the attempt to link teacher competence to test scores.
Standards can be addressed in a non draconian way but aim of Bush,Cumo and
others is to replace public schools with charters and end basic union rights
for teachers–who fought hard for tenure and basic rights in terms of
being treated a a professional.
You are exactly correct about the desire to replace public schools with charter and destroy the union. The government wants out of the education business. It appears to me that they just want to give private industry an amount of money and say here, educate the students with this amount and if you can’t do it we will find someone else. Unionized teachers are too expensive. This is being done under the guise of school choice by the governor in NYS.
Politicians can assert anything they want, Unfortunately, they are not experts in the field they are assessing. Politicians open their mouths to forward an agenda; often it is not to make changes to better the lives of ordinary people. The Common Core assumes people are robots, all learning the same thing at the same rate. This, of course, is an ignorant assertion. “Every state in the nation has a mini-Massachusetts-Mississippi contrast within its own borders.” Of course, test scores reflect socioeconomic levels. The test scores results correlate to the population tested, not the Common Core or even the teachers. Schools have always had students that lagged behind the norm. When a “Nation at Risk” came out, suddenly politicians blasted public education for its failure. Where were the talking heads before, when the poor lagged behind the middle class? Oddly enough, this is about the same time and neo-liberals and conservatives realized money could be made establishing privatized schools. Through NCLB these vested interests discovered a vehicle to launch their attack against public education…testing!
After reading this posting and thread, turn to the blog of Dr. Mercedes Schneider (aka deutsch29) for a posting she entitled “The American Enterprise Institute, Common Core, and ‘Good Cop’” in which she quotes Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a charter member of the self-styled “education reform” establishment:
[start]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end]
Link: https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
Again, Dr. Hess is not a critic of the education status quo but a firm and unwavering member of it. He simply put on his blog for all to see, what he actually thinks. Cat is out of the bag.
The simple truth is, CCSS and its conjoined twin, high-stakes standardized testing, are set up to (as Dr. Audrey Amrein-Beardsley puts it) “measure-and-punish.” Or, as I think of it now, to “measure-to-punish.”
Excepting those new to the ed debates, anyone surprised by this posting is a victim of a sucker punch—
Self-administered.
😎
The report refers only to math standards and achievement. The report is technically less than meets the eye, including the notes for tables. It is a truncated view of education.
This is one more example of a tempest in a teapot and skewing discussions of education around easy to access banks of data, these mostly in math, ELA, and occasionally science, rarely social studies, history, civics, the arts.
As you can tell, I am increasingly impatient with grand generalizations framed as if this is the 19th century and the 3Rs are the essence and end of education that matters.
Ohio has over 3000 standards on the books. There are at least 1,620 CCSS standards counting parts a to e. We are drowning in standards and tests. It is time for some criticism of claims about the whole of education based on the aggrandizement of results from churning test score data through statistical formulas.
During my more than three and and half decades in public education, I have participated in numerous standards and curricula projects for New York state and my local school district. I have written objectives ad nauseum. The best advice I ever got about teaching came from Mary Ellen Giacobbe and Nancy Atwell. Here it is: “If what you are doing makes sense, do more of it. If what you are doing makes no sense, stop it.” This is simple advice, yet profound. Too bad the people in charge won’t follow this simple advice. I always used those words to guide my practice. Sadly, today much of what teachers must do is absurd, top-down nonsense, unless they choose civil disobedience.
I totally agree with the Giacobbe/Atwell advice, but unfortunately the execution rests on the premise that teachers are trained professionals with good judgement. The “reformers,” with all their business expertise, don’t seem to believe that. Perhaps it just doesn’t fit their plan of control and wealth.
Wow. This is radical even for ed reformers;
“Under the plan, an independent commissioner appointed by the county executive would take control of three of the lowest-performing schools in the district after the 2015 school year. Everyone who works at the school would be fired and forced to reapply for their jobs. The commissioner could also convert the schools into private — but non-religious — voucher schools or turn over operation to an independent charter school.”
They’re getting rid of even the thin veneer of “public”. They will literally convert public schools to private schools.
I wonder if one could do a legal challenge based on politicians converting public property to a private entity. They’re just taking public property at this point. They’ve dropped any pretense of “public”. Does the public have any rights as to the property they own? They won’t get it back once this current crop of politicians are gone, off to their lucrative private sector careers. Can they seize a public school and turn it over to private owners?
http://www.twincities.com/politics/ci_28154019/milwaukee-other-wisconsin-school-districts-face-takeover
“Not because the standards are good or bad, but because standards alone don’t raise achievement,”
“The quality of standards has not mattered.”
I’m afraid that we “lose” some of our audience by not explicitly distinguishing between the term “standards” and “educational standards”.
Standards used in the proper setting, in the proper fashion and vetted by all who will be working with them are fine and dandy-think the vast majority of manufacturing and usage of that process, electrical, plumbing, building, engineering, etc. . . .
Educational standards, though, are a completely different attempt at using a very legitimate process (see paragraph directly above) of making and using standards into a realm, the teaching and learning process in which STANDARDIZATION IS LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. By chance, someone please tell me what the “standard” of love is!!
But, I digress with that last thought. We, those who are fighting this battle, must be very cautious and conscious of our word usage. To say “standard” when we mean really mean “educational standard” is sloppy word usage that serves only to muddle the discourse. Come on, folks, let’s clean it up a bit and use “educational standards” (even though those supposed educational standards are chimerical, duendesque, illusory, non-existent) and not just “standards”.
“. . . those supposed educational standards are chimerical, duendesque, illusory, non-existent.”
To understand why that is so I urge all to read and comprehend what Noel Wilson has proven about educational standards in his never refuted nor rebutted treatise “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
“Standard Operating Procedure”
Raise the bar
Select the best
Keep the star
Discard the rest
“Standard Operating Procedure” (2)
Raise the bar
Select with test
Keep the star
Discard the rest
Aka “educational triage.”
And, figuratively speaking, why do the rheephormsters get to decide who lives and who dies?
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” [Ionesco]
😎
They get to decide because they are the gods of manufacturing, for which the above is the standard model.
of course, Bill gates uses a kind of inverse SOP, using the bottom 5% of the Bell Curve when he selects which Microsoft products get released.
The U. S. has always had educational standards. Text books drove the standards. The only difference now is that some think they can standardize students. Chairman Mao seemed to think he could also. So did Pol Pot. Dictators (people who think they know all the answers to creating a thriving civilization) demand standardization of human beings to prove they are correct.
However:
Not everyone learns in the same way on the same day.
Learning is exponential, not incremental.
Knowing a bunch of stuff doesn’t make you wise.
Indeed. Academic achievement and education are not the same thing. Actually at one time when one said that things were only of academic interest it was not a compliment.
Academics have their place of course but as a means to an end, not the end in itself.
AND
standards are great when they are well thought out, when they apply to the belief in democratic principles.
AND
when standards are applied equally to all parties, not just one.
I LOVE the equating of Chairman Mao and Pol Pot to what is going on in “education’ these days.
Well said.
Test-and-shame reform continues to do nothing more than shine a spotlight on the underbelly of America. Headlines that shout year after year after year, “Poor Kids Are Not Learning – Their Schools and Teachers Must Suck”.
Yet nothing is more telling that this:
“If the odd theory of standards-based reform were true, every child who had the same teachers and the same classes in the same school would have identical outcomes, but they don’t.”
Then ignore the the 800 pound gorilla riding the elephant in every classroom where kids some (or many) kids struggle to learn, while many (or some) do not: WHY?