We at Fordham are big fans of Jason Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist who just joined the team at the Manhattan Institute. So we were doubly disappointed to see him parrot the Russ Whitehurst/Tom Loveless argument that “standards don’t matter.”
Of course they don’t—in isolation. On their own, content standards are just words on paper (or, as Rick Hess likes to say, akin to restaurants’ mission statements). We’ve acknowledged as much for years.
The question is whether they can spark instructional change. That’s no sure thing; as we’ve argued forever, it takes a ton of hard work at the state and local levels. First, it requires developing tests that assess the full range of the standards, including the challenging ones; this is something that arguably no state save for Massachusetts actually did in the pre-Common Core era. Second, it means investing in high-quality curricular materials and allowing time for teachers to master them. (No, the curricular materials need not be—and should not be—“national.” But surely we can do better than the schlock that textbook companies have been peddling for years.)
This is where Riley’s argument falls apart. He quotes Whitehurst saying that teachers are what matter most—and it’s true that researchers have long found big differences in teacher effectiveness both within schools and across schools. But there’s no law of physics stating that such huge differences are inevitable. It’s arguably America’s uneven, amateurish approach to curriculum that explains the big variance in teachers from one classroom to the next.
Whitehurst himself has demonstrated that the effect sizes on student outcomes of choosing a good curriculum dwarf those of charter schools, preschool programs, and reconstituting the teacher workforce. “Leaving curriculum reform off the table or giving it a very small place makes no sense,” he observed not long ago. Or as Robert Pondiscio has argued:
The difference is not who the teacher is, but what the teacher does. And what the teacher does has to be learned, practiced, and mastered by the teachers we have, not the teachers we wished we had. There’s a tendency among education reformers and economists who study data on teacher effectiveness to say, “See, teacher effectiveness varies dramatically from one teacher to another, even in the same school. Weed out the ineffective ones!” The more effective approach would be to look at the same data and say, “What might help to elevate the less effective teachers? What might help the ordinary to become good, and the good become great?”
Will states and local districts do the difficult tasks to fulfill the promise of Common Core’s higher standards? The honest answer is that some will and some won’t. Some will adopt great new tests; some won’t. Some will choose fantastic new curricula; some won’t. Just like all meaningful change, Common Core is not self-implementing. We have to get the details right and stay at it over time.
But there are reasons to be hopeful on the testing and curriculum fronts; after all of this effort and all of this investment, it would be nuts to abort this promising reform just as it’s coming to fruition.
Perhaps the best argument for Common Core is that the new standards put curriculum and instruction “in play” in a way that is unprecedented in the reform era. In short, standards matter if for no other reason than they provide fuel and focus to efforts to improve curriculum and instruction.
We didn’t know whether school choice would work before we tried it; so it is with the Common Core. So let’s keep at it. We’ll see the results, one way or the other, soon enough.
