The Great Common Core Textbook Swindle
Cheryl Schafer was a veteran math teacher by the time Common Core arrived in New York back in 2010. It was apparent to her almost immediately that teachers didn’t have the materials they needed to teach to the new national standards.
Take a middle school staple like the Pythagorean Theorem: “One text series had it as a sixth grade unit, one had it at eighth grade, and the Common Core wanted us to teach it in seventh grade,” Schafer recalled. “So it didn't matter what you were using: there was disagreement all over the place.”
In response to the new standards, textbook publishers touted new editions they said were aligned to the Common Core. But nearly all of them were just repackaged versions of earlier books.
And even five years later, the vast majority of textbooks say they’re aligned with the Common Core when they actually aren’t, creating a huge burden for teachers whose performance is often tied to their students’ test scores based on those standards.
“If you don't have the material that you need, it makes your job incredibly more difficult,” Schafer said. Teachers were left scrambling, doing their best to make due with materials that often didn’t line up with what they were supposed to be teaching.
Schafer retired last year, pushed out of the classroom by stage four breast cancer. But she hasn’t stopped working in education. Today she’s a reviewer for a nonprofit called EdReports, whose executive director says the group wants to become a Consumer Reports for education. The group is funded by the Gates Foundation, the massive organization that led development and adoption of Common Core and hires teachers to conduct intensive reviews of textbooks.
Its ultimate goal is to exert a meaningful positive force on the multi-billion dollar textbook industry, which gets nearly all its income from taxpayer.
This spring, EdReports conducted its first round of reviews, looking at the best-selling math textbooks for elementary and middle schoolers. Of the more than 80 textbooks it reviewed, just 11 met expectations for alignment with the Common Core. Nine of those books were from a single series, “Eureka Math” by publisher Great Minds, whose materials aligned with Common Core from kindergarten through eighth grade.
EdReports released publisher responses alongside its own reviews. In a multi-page statement, publishing giant Pearson—which had zero textbooks evaluated as being aligned with the Common Core—said EdReports’ evaluations “reflect a very narrow interpretation” of Common Core “and fall short of the true intent of the standards."
And even five years later, the vast majority of textbooks say they’re aligned with the Common Core when they actually aren’t, creating a huge burden for teachers whose performance is often tied to their students’ test scores based on those standards.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—which had over 30 texts evaluated, none of which fully met standards—said it was “fully committed to working with our customers” and would continue to work toward improving its products.
As political fights over Common Core continue to rage on, the new standards have largely become a fact of life for most American teachers. They’re expected to teach to a test for those new standards. How each child performs on those tests is playing an increasing role in evaluations of the teachers, themselves—and, increasingly, it even affects their pay.
That's why teachers need materials that actually align with the Common Core: their paycheck could depend on it.
So if a teacher is saddled with a textbook that doesn’t align with the Common Core, they need to spend time patching together materials that will. That might The Great Common Core Textbook Swindle - The Daily Beast:
