If I had to pick just one reason to support Common Core, it would be to address the paucity of nonfiction texts read by students in elementary and middle school reading instruction. Gaps in background knowledge and vocabulary make it stubbornly difficult to raise reading achievement. Conceptualizing reading comprehension as a skill you can apply to any ol’ text broadly misses the point. By encouraging reading in history, science, and other disciplines across the curriculum, Common Core encourages “a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give [students] the background to be better readers in all content areas.”
Thus, it is great good news that the 2016 Brown Center Report on American Education finds the dominance of fiction waning in the fourth and eighth grades. The standards call for a 50/50 mix of fiction and non-fiction in fourth grade. In 2011, 63 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported emphasizing fiction in class, while only 38 percent said they emphasized non-fiction. A mere four years later, the gap is down to just eight percentage points (53 percent to 45 percent).
On the math side, CCSS asks for fewer topics or strands, as well as a focus on whole number arithmetic from kindergarten through fourth grade. “Teachers appear to be responding to the new focus,” writes report author Tom Loveless. “Fourth-grade teachers do not teach as much data and geometry as they once did,” he notes. “Neither domain received as much attention in 2015 as in 2011 or prior years.”
Let’s stop for a moment and not bury the lede: Two of the most important and valuable instructional shifts encouraged by Common Core are actually happening. In a field bedeviled by unintended consequences, this is something new under the sun. Changes in classroom practice encouraged from outside schools typically resemble a child’s game of telephone: A simple message can change dramatically with multiple retellings. If messages like “more nonfiction” and “fewer, deeper topics” in math are getting through to teachers intact, that’s not a bad thing and not a bad start.
To be sure, there’s far more we do not know about Common Core’s impact on instructional practice. Text selection is one of the most important decisions a school or district can make. The report sheds no light on the merits or complexity of texts put before children, or whether or not the amount of close reading demanded of students is growing or shrinking. The Brown Center study also finds “a dramatic change in the math courses taken by eighth graders.” Enrollment in advanced math courses (most notably algebra) has fallen from 48 percent to 43 percent, while enrollment in “general math” has seen a concomitant rise in enrollment from 26 percent to 32 percent—also attributable to Common Core adoption. Nothing, it should be noted, prevents states from insisting the every eighth grader take Algebra I—although the case has been made that too much advanced math, rather than increasing the number of college-ready students, has been increasing the number of high school dropouts instead.
The report explores whether middle school tracking is related to AP participation or test scores in high school, using state-level tracking data from 2009 and AP data from 2013. “[S]chools in communities serving large numbers of black and Hispanic students tend to shun tracking, while accelerated classes are less likely to exist for students of color,” notes Loveless, who nonetheless finds a positive relationship between tracking and superior performance on AP tests (scoring 3 or better) among white, black, and Hispanic students. He takes care to observe that the analysis “cannot prove or disprove that tracking caused the heightened success on AP tests.” However, he notes, “the findings do support future research on the hypothesis that tracking benefits high-achieving students—in particular, high-achieving students of color—by offering accelerated coursework that they would not otherwise get in untracked schools.”
Back to Common Core, the Brown Center report finds no relationship between strong, medium, and non-implementers of Common Core and changes in NAEP scores from 2009 to 2015. Gains and losses among all levels of implementation fall within a single NAEP scale score point. “Many advocates of CCSS have a theory of implementation that believes these standards are so new, so revolutionary, so different from what teachers have experienced previously that Common Core won’t bear fruit for many years,” Loveless explains.
Sort of. It’s a combination of instructional shifts, plus the weaknesses in K–12 revealed by the standards, that are likely to point to the richest vein of ore to mine. It’s also true that tests associated with the standards were only administered for the first time last year (the same year NAEP was in the field), and tests almost certainly have a greater effect on classroom practice than standards alone. This will take considerable time to bear fruit, but I’d be deeply suspicious of any rapid gains attributed to Common Core—on NAEP or elsewhere. You should be too.
SOURCE: Tom Loveless, “The 2016 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well are American Students Learning?,” Brookings Institution (March 2016).
