Thomas B Fordham Institute - Advancing Educational Excellence

Why conservatives should support the Common Core

yes Kathleen Porter-Magee , yes Sol Stern / April 3, 2013

The new “Common Core” math and reading standards have come under a firestorm of criticism from tea-party activists and commentators like Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin. Beck calls the standards a stealth “leftist indoctrination” plot by the Obama administration. Malkin warns that they will “eliminate American children’s core knowledge base in English, language arts and history.” As education scholars at two right-of-center think tanks, we feel compelled to set the record straight.

Photo by susivinh

Here’s what the Common Core State Standards are: They describe what children should know and the skills that they must acquire at each grade level to stay on course toward college- or career-readiness, something that conservatives have long argued for. They were written and adopted by governors—not by the Obama administration—thus preserving state control over K–12 education. And they are much more focused on rigorous back-to-basics content than the vast majority of state standards they replaced.

The Common Core standards are also not a curriculum; it’s up to state and local leaders to choose aligned curricula. The Fordham Institute has carefully examined the new expectations and compared them with existing state standards: They found that for most states, Common Core is a great improvement in rigor and cohesiveness.

For decades, students in

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Why conservatives should support the Common Core

Opening up the black box: Common Core as a classroom-level reform

yes Kathleen Porter-Magee / March 6, 2013

This post is adapted from comments delivered at the Manhattan Institute’s Curriculum Counts! event.

If Common Core is really going to "change everything," we must focus on what these standards mean for teaching and learning. Photo by horizontal.integration

Broadly speaking, there are two categories of school reform: systemic reform and classroom-level reform.

Systemic reforms are those aimed at reimagining school systems, and they include things like charter schools, vouchers, portfolio districts, and even accountability and some systemic teacher-evaluation policies. Classroom-level reforms, by contrast, are those aimed at actually changing what happens in the classroom. They focus, for example, on changing what is taught, how it is taught, or even how student mastery of essential content and skills is measured.

Over the past decade, education reformers have focused the lion’s share of our attention on systemic reform—to the point where conversations about Common Core implementation are often even dominated by how the standards will impact things like state accountability, teacher evaluation, certification, and on.

Of course, those are all important. But if Common Core is really going to “change everything,” we need first and foremost to focus on what these new standards mean for teaching and learning.

Yet, in many ways, the classroom is a black box to systemic reformers. While many leaders have

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Opening up the black box: Common Core as a classroom-level reform

Trust but verify: The real lessons of Campbell’s Law

yes Kathleen Porter-Magee / February 26, 2013

Donald Campbell was an American social psychologist and noted experimental social science researcher who did pioneering work on methodology and program evaluation. He has also become—posthumously—an unlikely hero of the anti-testing and accountability movement in the United States. In the hands of accountability critics, his 50 years of research on methodology and program evaluation have been boiled down to a simple retort against testing: Campbell’s Law. But a deeper reading of his work reveals a more complicated and constructive message: Measuring progress (using both quantitative and qualitative indicators) is essential; when using quantitative data for evaluation, the indicators can become distorted or manipulated; and there are concrete steps we can—and must—take to minimize data manipulation and distortion.

Campbell’s December 1976 article, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change,” has become a flashpoint in the educational accountability debate. There, he argued,

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Foes of testing and accountability frequently evoke this “Law” to argue against the use of standardized tests and test-based accountability. In a May 25 blog post, for example, Diane Ravitch explained:

Campbell’s Law helps us understand why No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are harmful to education…As high-stakes testing has become the main driver of our nation’s education policy, we will

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Trust but verify: The real lessons of Campbell’s Law

The Common Core implementation gap

yes Andy Smarick / February 19, 2013

A new report on state-level implementation of Common Core merits some attention—but less for its top-line findings and more for how it confirms what I’m now calling the “Common Core Implementation Gap.”

That’s the miles of daylight between the platitudes about the new standards’ “dramatic,” “transformational” nature and the distressing reality of implementation.

The report’s upside is that we now know more about state-level planning. The downside is that we know nothing more about the quality of that planning—and this is the whole ball of wax.

We’ve made the necessary oblations to Common Core, and now it’s time to get serious about the seriousness of implementation.

This might sound like the classic unfair criticism of a research project—point out what you wanted a study to answer and then shame the authors for looking into something else.

I’m succumbing to this temptation because I’m troubled by all of the Common Core cheerleading going on. Apart from a still relatively small band criticizing the standards for stealing fiction and states’ rights, most reformers contend that Common Core is just shy of avert-your-eyes miraculous.

Tom Loveless had the temerity to wonder if the standards would improve achievement, and the response from their incredulous supporters was, said Loveless, “like putting my hand in a hornet’s nest.”

We’ve made the necessary oblations to Common Core, and now it’s time to get serious about the seriousness of implementation. That means no longer marveling at the shiny hubcaps and supple leather interior

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The Common Core implementation gap