9 Promises Common Core Has Already Broken
The establishment wants you to think Common Core is a shiny legacy for departing Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Nothing close.
Education may be the area of government policy most rife with fantasy. Reality beats it back periodically, and we’re entering another such stretch currently, as Common Core supporters’ fantastical promises disintegrate five years after the bigs pushed this impossibly utopian project on our country.
Maybe that’s why Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently announced his resignation, a curious seven years into his tenure with Obama. There’s no political advantage to “needing to spend more time with his family” at this very moment—unless his Common Core chickens are coming home to roost. And they are.
So, while Politico recently proclaimed “Common Core has won,” the truth is that its victory is a gossamer bubble in slow-motion burst. With it bursts most of Duncan’s work over his DC tenure. Leave while the going is good, right?
Five years ago, while announcing $330 million in direct-from-(probably future)-taxpayers startup funds for the second half of the Common Core project—its tests, which operated on exclusive federal funds for four years—Duncan made a pile of promises about these tests, which are Common Core’s built-in enforcement mechanism. Unfortunately for Duncan, and even more unfortunately for the millions of American kids and teachers he shoehorned into this evidence-less Rube Goldberg flight of fancy, his promises are proving false. Here are just 9 promises Common Core has already broken. Don’t worry. More will come.
1. End ‘Lying to Children and Parents’
The big news on the Common Core front lately is that, despite oodles of pledges to the contrary, states using the barely operative national Common Core tests Arne funded have done exactly what he said they would not. Namely, Ohio and Arkansas have decided to use lower benchmarks for student proficiency than their compatriots using these tests. So in the first year of Common Core results states are already bending to the political pressure we were promised Common Core would block. (Facing an uproar, Arkansas backed down—for now.)
What they really want to do is substitute central planners’ judgment for teachers’ and parents’ judgment, then hide that they’re doing this under the veneer of ‘science’ and ‘data.’
It’s not just those two. Illinois, Massachusetts, California, Florida, and North Carolina (at least) have done the same,The New York Times reported. Louisiana struggled to maintain the line this year, which “does not bode well for the future,” an in-state editorial board opined. “This was exactly the problem that a lot of policy makers and educators were trying to solve,” the director of a Bill Gates-funded Common Core PR shop told the NYT. When states did this before Common Core, Duncan blasted it as “lying to children and parents.” So what is it now?
Let me explain how this sleight of hand works. It’s a common education bureaucrat trick. First, test children. Then, think about how many you cannot politically afford to label “failing.” And set the passing bar on the test for that number. Think I’m joking? Indiana is doing this very thing on its own new Common Core tests right now. That states did this pre-Common Core is extremely well-documented, and it was a major justification Duncan and many others used to push Common Core. Well, it’s back. And we could have known that would happen beforehand.
There’s basically no other way to set a passing bar on a test, because what a, say, fifth grader should know is relatively subjective. It’s a total judgment call. It’s not an exact science, no matter how much test-mongers try to insist or imply otherwise. What they really want to do is substitute central planners’ judgment for teachers’ and parents’ judgment, then hide that they’re doing this under the veneer of “science” and “data.” Even the Common Core test controllers themselves used the same process when setting their “proficiency” levels.
Doing the same thing over and over again and promising different results? I think that’s how you define “bureaucrat.”
2. Test Scores Comparable Across States
That failure creates another closely related one. Duncan promised us that national Common Core tests means, “For the first time, it will be possible for parents and schools leaders to assess and compare in detail how students in their state are doing compared to students in other states.”
This was actually a lie at the time Duncan said it.
Even though Common Core has subsequently failed to live up to this promise (see item No. 1 above), this was actually a lie at the time Duncan said it. I say “lie,” as in “deliberate falsehood,” because at the same moment he was saying this he was in charge of a set of national tests that “detailed how students in one state compare to those in all the others,” called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP has been providing nationwide data on student performance in core subjects since 1969, with state-by-state results available since 2001.
Since Common Core has moved into place, we’ve also seen that researchers can do statistical jujitsu to compare different state tests to each other using the same scale—to adapt a familiar analogy, they can compare apples to apples after having convertedoranges to apples. Here is just one recent study doing that very thing. Florida has done that every year for some time, in order to release comparable test results from schools in its statewide voucher programs without compelling them to use the same test.
3. ‘Actionable’ Test Scores Released Quickly
One of the major complaints teachers have about federally mandated annual tests in reading and math is that the results are “an autopsy, not a diagnosis.” Meaning kids take the tests in April, a good two or three months before exiting school, but the results typically didn’t arrive until late summer or fall, when those same kids were off into the next grade. So teachers couldn’t use the results to, as the lingo goes, “inform instruction,” meaning to actually help children improve.
Does ‘immediate’ mean ‘six months later’?
Duncan and the rest of the Common Core cabal promised us Common Core tests would be different. In announcing the federal grant to these tests, Duncan touted tests “that are instructionally useful and document student growth—rather than just relying on after-the-fact, year-end tests used for accountability purposes.” He also promised these tests would provide students “immediate feedback.”
Now, I know bureaucracy is slow, but reality has stretched that “immediate” beyond recognition. Does “immediate” mean “six months later”? If it doesn’t, Duncan’s promises have proved false once again. Most of the Common Core exams were administered in April of this year, with some in March and May. It’s October, and states are finally just releasing the results. The long wait frustrated the Illinois state superintendent: “Ideally individual student results would be available at the start of the school year so that teachers, parents, and students could use them to inform instruction. This year, we expect individual student results later in the fall. In subsequent years we expect to have them much sooner.”
He’s not the only one. Mississippi educators are upset they’ll have to wait until December or January to see this spring’s Common Core test scores. ““We were under the initial impression that we would get the data back in a timely manner,” a local superintendent told an in-state paper. Yes, you were under that impression because the U.S. education secretary and his lackeys have been saying this for five years. Too bad they can’t be trusted.
4. ‘Transparent’ Results
Common Core was also supposed to let teachers and parents know exactly where children in each grade were in their dull trudge up the education-industrial treadmill towards the workforce hamster wheel. “For the first time, millions of schoolchildren, parents, and teachers will know if students are on-track for colleges and careers—and if they are ready to enter college without the need for remedial 9 Promises Common Core Has Already Broken:
