Nearly a decade later, did the Common Core work? New research offers clues
A 2008 report offered a dire warning: U.S. schools were falling behind their international peers. Its prescription: states should “adopt a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts.”
The idea of the Common Core would soon gain steam. Thanks to interest from state leaders and financial incentives offered by the federal government and private philanthropies, most states adopted new academic standards over the next few years. That would soon mean new tests, new textbooks, and new teaching methods — and in many places, backlash to those changes.
But amid the fierce debates, there has been virtually no research on whether the standards were actually accomplishing their goal of improving student learning.
Until now. A new study, released in April through a federally funded research center, shows that states that changed their standards most dramatically by adopting the Common Core didn’t outpace other states on federal NAEP exams. By 2017 — seven years after most states had adopted them — the standards appear to have led to modest declines in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores.
“It’s rather unexpected,” said researcher Mengli Song of the American Institutes for Research. “The magnitude of the negative effects tend to increase over time. That’s a little troubling.”
Studying the effects of Common Core is challenging, since the changes reached so many students nationwide at the same time — so there is a good deal of uncertainty in determining whether the standards were successful. And another study, which has not yet been published, offers a more encouraging view: the Common Core may have led to modest increases in test scores, though it only looked through 2013.
But the latest research suggests that even in the best case scenario, the academic CONTINUE READING: Nearly a decade later, did the Common Core work?
