Reports Show Small Gains After Common Core
Some student test scores have inched up, but it's not clear whether Common Core is the reason.
Years after most states adopted the Common Core State Standards, it's unclear if the academic benchmarks are having a positive impact on student learning. And it might be a while before we know for sure.
Two studies released this week – one from the Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy and the other from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research – showed small gains on students' scores nationally on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and in Kentucky on the ACT. But it hasn't been determined whether those gains can be attributed to the Common Core standards, which most states only fully implemented within the last one to two years.
Some supporters of the standards have said in the past that it's too soon to measure the impact of Common Core and that national exams such as NAEP only test every other year – 2011 and 2013, for example – when implementation arguably wasn't very far along. Students also have been making incremental gains in reading and math on the NAEP exam for years.
Morgan Polikoff, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California, says there are several factors that complicate research design on this issue. Because only four states didn't adopt Common Core, it's difficult to come up with a solid comparison group, he says.
"With those two issues – the lack of data and the newness of this all, plus the fact that it's hard to define a good comparison group – to me, it's not really worth doing these studies yet," Polikoff says. "I worry that they might actually provide misleading evidence. By trying to be first out of the gate, they might make people think these things aren't working and so we should change course, when in fact it could just be that we don't yet have the data to do a really good study."
Tom Loveless, a nonresident senior fellow in governance studies at the Brown Center, in his report brings up another issue that complicates how the value of Common Core is measured. It's hard to determine the true "starting point" for Common Core, Loveless writes. Not all states adopted Common Core at the same time – although most did between 2010 and 2011 – and implementation timetables have also varied.
"You can’t figure out whether a policy worked or not unless you know when it began," Loveless writes in the report. "The goal is not only to estimate [Common Core's] early impact, but also to lay out a fair approach for establishing when the Common Core’s impact began – and to do it now before data are generated that either critics or supporters can use to bolster their arguments."
The Brookings report compares the fourth grade reading scores on the NAEP exam among states, categorizing them based on how strongly they implemented the standards. The 19 states categorized as "strong implementers," Loveless writes, spent money on more activities and aimed for full implementation by the 2012-13 school year. Another 27 states were "medium implementers," while four states – Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia – were grouped together since they never adopted Common Core.
Overall, Loveless found a 1.1 point advantage in reading gains among strong implementers over non-adopters, similar to the 1.27 point advantage the center found last year in eighth grade math.
"These differences, although certainly encouraging to [Common Core] supporters, are quite small, amounting to (at most) 0.04 standard deviations on the NAEP scale," Loveless writes. "A threshold ... five times larger ... is often invoked as the minimum size for a test score change to be regarded as Five Years In, It's Unclear if Common Core Is Helping Students - US News:
