Seven years after most states adopted Common Core standards, “the standards appear to have led to modest declines in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores, reports Matt Barnum on Chalkbeat.
He cites a new study that “states that changed their standards most dramatically by adopting the Common Core didn’t outpace other states on federal NAEP exams.” They did worse.
“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.”
“One thing standards advocates need to think about is that this doesn’t appear to work very well,” said Tom Loveless, who has analyzed the standards for the Brookings Institution
Song’s team compared states more or less affected by the switch to the Common Core.
Implementation of the new standards was rocky, but “it’s hard to pin the findings on bad implementation” when results are getting worse, not better, over time, writes Barnum.
Common Core is an “expensive disaster” due to “the standards themselves,” not poor implementation, writes Lance Izumi, senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute and author of Choosing Diversity
According to the Boston-based Pioneer Institute, which has closely studied Common Core, “Instead of accelerating the curriculum to more advanced topics and following the practices of leading international competitors, Common Core’s politically-driven process resulted in the adoption of the mediocre curriculum sequences used in a number of mid-performing states and promoted progressive instructional dogmas shared by its developers.”
Dump the Core, Izumi concludes.