How would you solve this
equation? For most of us, it's as simple as following a series
of familiar steps to get us to that answer. Now, remember this.
This is how students under Common Core were taught to solve
the exact same question. First adopted in 2009, Common Core was
an ambitious initiative to revolutionize the American
education system. 41 states, the District of Columbia and four
territories signed up to participate. National leaders
from Bill Gates to President Obama supported the idea of the
common curriculum, and it cost an estimated $15.8 billion to
implement. They thought standards were just
too low in the US, and that we could have kids learn more in
school if we raise standards. Quite frankly, they didn't
really trust the schools to do this on their own. One of the most challenging
aspects was we understood our curriculum, and we were
basically thrown a curveball into what it was, and had to
really adopt new practices. But a couple of years after its
launch, it was met with confusion and ridicule. Some of the math items that were
mocked, I think, deserve to be mocked. Frankly, they were just
very poor items. People deserve to know the
truth, but it wasn't the truth. I was 15 in 1977, and I'll be 30
next week. I don't think that math checks out, I don't get
math. I went to school in the 2000s, and we were taught Common
Core. All of a sudden, parents were
having to help their kids with math homework, that they
couldn't quite grasp because they hadn't been taught math
that way. So how can the US fix our
lagging school system? Can a common curriculum work? The Common Core is a set of
standards specifically designed to better prepare American
students for success in college and their workplace. These
standards determine what a student should know and be able
to do in language arts and math from kindergarten through senior
year of high school. When you should know algebra,
should it be eighth grade? Should it be ninth grade? Should
you be capable of doing algebra one or algebra two? You know,
when would it be appropriate to move into calculus, things of
that nature. It's important to have a
standard because you have to have a clear vision or goal of
where you're going. And what it is that you expect for your
students to be able, what output do you expect from them. I think
that if you go in without any expectations for your students,
they themselves are going to be unclear, right? What it is that
they are showing up to school every single day to achieve. Besides setting these
benchmarks, Common Core also brought changes to how students
were taught. There definitely was a shift,
especially in just your thought and thinking about how you
approach lesson plans, and how you are going to make sure that
you are disseminating the information in a way to your
students that they can receive it. Do you know the Pythagorean
Theorem, right? Like, okay, a squared plus b squared equals c
squared, you can probably ask any adult and they can shoot
that back to you. It was more about, if you have that
knowledge, if you understand what it is, where do you use
that? How do you apply it? On the language arts side, there
was much more of a focus on moving a little bit away from
fiction to much more focus on the critical thinking using real
live documents like studying Hamilton papers or something
like that, to really understand what was going on at that time
of the revolution. There were two main reasons why
the initiative received so much support in its early years. The
first was fear that America was lagging behind other countries
in academic performance. In 2009, the US showed middling
performance in reading and science and scored below average
in mathematics, compared to the average score among OECD
countries. The idea was we're gonna hold
schools responsible for teaching to a higher level, and then test
kids to see whether or not they've attained that higher
level. The second reason was that the
Common Core allowed different states to accurately compare
their academic performances by having a uniform standard for
education. And while one state might now
say we're doing a great job of achieving our standards, but the
standards are very low. And another state is saying, yeah,
we're not doing as well as we'd like to be doing and achieving
our standards, but they're very high. This makes for a confusing
conversation. With these intentions in mind,
two nonprofit groups, The Council of Chief State School
Officers and the National Governors Association developed
the standards. Achieve, a nonprofit education reform
group, as well as various teachers unions, including the
National Education Association and the American Federation of
Teachers joined in to help the process. So when they got together in
2009, what they did first is they had a memorandum of
understanding that they had states sign on to and it
basically said, okay, we're gonna go write these standards.
You don't have to accept them now, but can you at least say
you'll be interested in looking at them and might accept them
down the road if you find them to meet your needs. And over 45
states signed on to that memorandum of understanding. We made sure that we were having
K 12 teachers talk to freshmen, sophomore professors to make
sure we knew what postsecondary was expecting, and making sure
we build on those expectations from K through 12. Since Common Core was a state
led initiative, the federal government did not play a major
role in developing the standards. However, it did play
a role in promoting them. The Obama administration's Race to
the Top fund offered $4.35 billion in grants for states
agreeing to adopt any college and career ready standards. We will end what has become a
race to the bottom in our schools and instead spur a race
to the top by encouraging better standards and assessments. This
is an area where we are being outpaced by other nations. It's
not that their kids are any smarter than ours, it's that
they are being smarter about how to educate their children. In fact, we were hitting bottom
in 2009, 2010, in the Great Recession. And so states were
desperate for money, the Obama administration put together a
recovery package for the states. But one of the requirements was
they had to have adopted College and Career Readiness Standards,
which is a code word for Common Core. This was seen as Obama
administration support for Common Core, and that's not an
unfair accusation. Facing minimal resistance, it
seemed as though Common Core would be a guaranteed success. We had a meeting in 2010 to have
all the entities sign off on the adoption of the Common Core. We
had unanimous across the state agreement, because so many
Kentucky teachers had been involved and giving feedback and
writing the standards. But a couple of years later,
things took a turn as the efficacy of the new standard
came into question. It also didn't help that the Common Core
became the subject of ridicule by parents and the media
unfamiliar with the concepts taught under the new standard. A lot of parents were getting
homework that came home that they just didn't understand.
They thought it was bizarre. I went through Common Core with
my kids. And I remember looking at my daughter and going I'm not
entirely clear why what you're doing. So I'm just going to show
you long division the way I know it. It wasn't until a decade later
that federally funded research was conducted to find out what
the impact of Common Core had on students performance over time,
the results were disappointing. The studies ranged from tiny
negative effects to tiny positive effects and a lot of
neutral effects in the middle. So the one thing we can be
pretty certain of is that Common Core did not have a dramatic
impact on student achievement the United States. Did we raise standards? Yes, we
did. Did we raise expectations on assessments? Yes, we did.
Have we improved student performance? No. There are numerous theories as
to why the Common Core has failed to improve student
performance. But the most popular theory is that the
standards took away the control from teachers who always have a
better understanding of what their students need. The idea that you could dictate
curriculum to a teacher or dictate instruction to a teacher
from kind of remote control, from up above and say, well,
here, here it is, that you're going to teach. It's simply
unrealistic. Kids are not cogs in a machine.
So we say something is going to happen in third grade, but
realistically, for some kids, it happened in second grade. And
for some kids, it's not going to happen till fifth grade. The
Common Core made that really hard. It really drew a huge
spotlight that all kids aren't going to learn things in the
same path and really started to mark that as success versus
failure. Another theory is that those who
wrote the standards didn't take into account the financial
difficulties of students across America. Studies have shown time
after time that children who grow up poor are more likely to
have poor academic achievement and drop out of high school.
Roughly 10 point 5 million children lived in poverty in the
US. A lot of children's needs are
not being met within the four walls of their school building.
And I think that we see that that deficit is even larger for
students from low income families or we have students of
color. As a country we just have not
committed to the underlying problem of student performance,
and that is poverty. Today, Common Core has fallen
out of favor more than 20 of the initial 45 states have either
repealed, revised or edited the standards. Four states,
including Arizona, Oklahoma, Indiana and South Carolina have
entirely withdrawn from the initiative. Former Secretary of
Education, Betsy DeVos, went as far as to call it a disaster,
concluding that the Common Core is dead at the federal level. I think you are seeing today
what kids experience in curriculum kind of is a little
bit more blended. It's not the holistic approach that maybe
Common Core introduced when we kind of swung completely to that
continuum, and parents would look at their children's, you
know, third grade homework and go, I don't get it. I don't think Common Core as
such has a future honestly now. It was a movement at a
particular time. It, it reached its heyday when we have
widespread adoption. And as I said, then there was a retreat
from that adoption, many of the states have held on
substantively to elements of that Common Core. But we've
moved on. A few states have also developed
a new educational standard as a replacement. On February 12
2020, Florida officially adopted the Benchmarks for Excellent
Student Thinking, or the BEST Standards as a replacement for
the Common Core. While New York has developed its own the Next
Generation Learning Standards that are expected to be
implemented by September 2022. Some, however, argue that none
of the newer standards would have been possible without the
work of Common Core. The standards that the states
have come up with, where they claim they were different from
Common Core, they're really not that much different. In fact,
some states just basically took the Common Core label off and
then slap the new label on the package. So the Common Core is not going
to go anywhere. I feel confident in saying that, what I think is
probably going to happen is the continued evolution of the
implementation of the Common Core. So the standards
themselves will probably continue to exist and be anchors
for our practice. What both supporters and the
opponents of the original standard do agree on, is that
Common Core was an initiative doomed to fail from the start,
mainly due to its politicalization. There were people who oppose
standardized testing, they tend to be on the political left,
they didn't like the Common Core test. It was this left right
coalition that really doomed Common Core politically, it
wasn't necessarily evidence coming out that Common Core was
effective or not effective. Once it became politicized, then
all bets were off, states that have adopted it began to
retreat, people began to relabel their standards, even if they
were essentially the same standards, they didn't want the
label Common Core because that had become politicized and
identified with a political party or political leader, and
the thing began to fall apart. While the Biden administration
has not yet explicitly commented on the matter, experts believe
that the federal government will continue to not involve
themselves in the future of educational standards. I don't think you're gonna see
the Biden administration enthusiastically embrace Common
Core. But experts assure that
education in the United States will continue to improve as long
as there are those who believe in the importance of education. The future of education is
extraordinary. And it's extraordinarily important,
because what we need to recognize is that education is
the asset our community is built upon it's the thing that we
invest in to ensure community growth. It matters whether they learn it
or they don't, and if they're not learning it as an individual
student, or as a subgroup of students, then we have an
obligation as the adults in America to do what we can to
bring them up to the standard because the standard is
ultimately what they need to survive and thrive in this
economy, which is ultimately what we as a society and as a
nation, need if we're gonna survive and thrive as a
democracy and as a 21st century international economy.
