AIR and Fordham Institute Grade Standards; Common Core Wins!
This is the story of two organizations that took diverging roads to grading state standards: American Institutes for Research (AIR) and Fordham Institute.
Let’s start with AIR.
In a report released September 2014, AIR has “internationally benchmarked” state education standards. Now, this is not to be confused with the famed-yet-elusive “international benchmarking” of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). That “benchmarking” has gone the way of the mythical jackalope.
It appears that AIR is surprised that in the face of test-driven, perfection-demanding No Child Left Behind (NCLB), states gamed the system by setting “low expectations” and then meeting them.
AIR international benchmarking of state standards assumes that the standards can be graded via test score outcomes– and fail in comparison to CCSS, which has no test score outcomes to use yet– but just trust that CCSS is *better, higher, fairer, fewer, and clearer*. So, AIR decided to grade state standards based upon test scores.
(When in doubt, just grade something. That’ll solve it.)
And now, for a Fordham Institute moment:
When the Fordham Institute whipped out its 2010 report in which it purportedly graded state standards and CCSS– in July 2010– only one month following the official completion of CCSS– Fordham Institute completely ignored the dissonancebetween its standards ratings and corresponding state scores on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
If test scores are everything in the reformer mindset, how does Fordham justify ignoring them?
Silence.
There is no logic to connect test-driven Fordham Institute and its grading of state standards with a test of central privatizer focus, state NAEP scores. Thus, highly-graded state standards might have low corresponding NAEP scores, or vice-versa. But it doesn’t really matter since Fordham declared CCSS The Winner in the absence of no outcome evidence and despite Fordham Institute’s own grading of CCSS with an AIR and Fordham Institute Grade Standards; Common Core Wins! | deutsch29: