The Education Gadfly Weekly

by Katie Cristol and Brinton S. Ramsey

Foreword by Amber M. Northern and Michael J. Petrilli

The Common Core State Standards are in place in forty-five states—and in many of those jurisdictions, educators are hard at work trying to bring them to life in their schools and classrooms.

But how is implementation going so far? That’s what this new study explores in four “early-implementer” school systems. Common Core in the Districts: An Early Look at Early Implementers provides an in-depth examination of real educators as they earnestly attempt to put higher standards into practice. This up-close look at district-level, school-level, and classroom-level implementation yields several key findings:

1. Teachers and principals are the primary faces and voices of the Common Core standards in their communities
2. Implementation works best when district and school leaders lock onto the Common Core standards as the linchpin of instruction, professional learning, and accountability in their buildings
3. In the absence of externally vetted, high-quality Common Core materials, districts are striving—with mixed success—to devise their own
4. The scramble to deliver quality CCSS-aligned professional development to all who need it is as crucial and (so far) as patchy as the quest for suitable curriculum materials
5. The lack of aligned assessments will make effective implementation of the Common Core challenging for another year

In short, districts are in the near-impossible situation of operationalizing new standards before high-quality curriculum and tests aligned to them are finished. Yet the clock is ticking, and the new tests and truly aligned textbooks are forthcoming. Today’s implementation is a bit like spring training, a time when focusing on the fundamentals, teamwork, and steady improvement is more important than the score.

Download Common Core in the Districts: An Early Look at Early Implementers to learn how implementation of these ambitious new academic standards is working in a high-performing suburb, a trailblazer, an urban bellwether, and a creative implementer—and to glean lessons for districts and schools across the nation.

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If you have questions about the book, please email Amber Northern.

Just because some criticisms of Common Core standards are over the top and dripping with misinformation doesn’t make them all so. Plenty of valid concerns exist, and the estimable Peggy Noonan recently homed in on several of them. She acknowledges “that Core proponents’ overall objective—to get schools teaching more necessary and important things, and to encourage intellectual coherence in what is taught—is not bad, but good.” But she raised a lot of questions for “eggheads” like us who have pushed for these ambitious new academic standards:

Proponents are now talking about problems with the rollout. Well, yes, and where have we heard that before? One gets the impression they didn’t think this through, that they held symposia and declared the need, with charts and bullet points, for something to be done—and something must be done, because American public education is falling behind the world—and then left it to somebody, or 10,000 somebodies, to make it all work….How was implementation of the overall scheme supposed to work?

Did we think this through? A major reason we support the Common Core is because we’re confident that it will bring greater “intellectual coherence,” in Noonan’s words, to America’s curricular and instructional approaches. That’s sorely needed because the textbooks and other materials that most schools use are dreadful and have been for decades.

Why so bad? Partly it’s due to the textbook oligopoly. (As behemoth Pearson has purchased many of its competitors in recent years, it’s approaching an outright monopoly.) Partly it’s because local school systems, themselves shielded from competition, haven’t been fussy customers. Partly it’s ideology—folks poorly trained in our anti-intellectual ed schools are enamored of curricular and pedagogical nonsense that doesn’t come close to demonstrating classroom effectiveness but hits all the right buttons of political correctness. And partly it’s because of the fragmentation of America’s primary-secondary education system itself—14,000 school districts, fifty different sets of state standards and tests—that makes disrupting this industry, indeed even entering this market, such a challenge for small publishing upstarts.

So we have schools that purchase books like Everyday Math, which eschews honest arithmetic in favor of fuzzy math and the overuse of calculators; Teachers College Writers Workshop, which downplays grammar but obsesses about the “process” of writing (a process that’s not based in any research); and all manner of reading programs that fixate on “skills” while ignoring literature, history, science, and everything else that might make reading an enjoyable and enlightening experience (and that might actually prepare kids to understand what will be taught to them downstream).

The remedy for these problems, let us be clear, is not a national curriculum. But neither is it to bay “local control” at the moon and just let schools continue to do what they’ve been doing. That just ain’t working. The truth is that proponents of common-sense curriculum reform—e.g., the notion that schools should choose textbooks and reading programs that can display some evidence of effectiveness—haven’t had any levers by which to advance such reforms. If you’re a governor and you’re told that your school districts are buying terrible math and reading programs, how do you fix it?

The only answer that makes sense to us is for a state to make sure that its math and reading standards are clear, coherent, and rigorous; that its tests line up with those standards; that its schools and educators are held to account for getting better results in terms of real student learning; and that research is done to examine the effectiveness of various curricular products. In other words, you encourage the use of the good stuff—and make shoddy results more obvious when you use stuff that doesn’t work. That’s precisely the strategy behind the Common Core.

So how’s it going today? As Noonan indicates, not nearly well enough, although some of what’s happening was predictable (and should have been anticipated). Textbook publishers are fibbing, declaring that their old materials, perhaps with a few paragraphs altered, are suddenly “Common Core aligned.” Like the proverbial blind men touching an elephant, some educators are “seeing” what they want to in the Common Core, usually the same strategies and methods they’ve been using for years. Administrators are downplaying the major instructional changes that are needed to implement the Common Core and bring “intellectual coherence” to U.S. schools.

In other words, in this first phase of implementation, everybody seems bent on changing as little as possible. That’s human nature and standard organizational behavior and hence is no big surprise—and not necessarily a big problem, considering that the real incentives meant to change behavior haven’t yet arrived. The new tests don’t come out till next spring in most states and won’t count for a few years after that. Once educators and local (and state) officials see how poorly their kids are doing on these tougher assessments and what the standards really require, they will start looking for better curricular materials and training.

And thanks to the nationwide market that the Common Core has begun to create, those better materials are coming. Look at what Rupert Murdoch and Joel Klein are hatching at Amplify: some amazing, old-fashioned, content-rich materials combined with the technology of web-connected tablets and the “kid appeal” of electronic games. The disruptors are knocking on the classroom door.

Of course, markets don’t work without good information. Someone needs to play “Consumer Reports” and start vetting textbooks and other materials and calling out the bad ones. John White, Louisiana’s exceptionally able commissioner of education, took a stab at that, and a group of foundations is currently standing up a new nonprofit to play this role, too. Of course the publishers will hate it.

States and districts also need to invest in serious training for current teachers and address misunderstandings as they appear. (The best example is early math, which was meant to be a major victory for traditionalists—master your arithmetic, kids!—but has been seen by many, from teachers to Louis C.K., as “fuzzy.”)

None of these is a cure-all. Some publishers will continue to print garbage, and some school districts will continue to buy it. Teachers will miss important nuances or misinterpret what’s expected of them. Education is a people business, indeed a millions-of-people business, and people are complicated and imperfect. It’s also a thoroughly decentralized industry, which is both weakness and strength.

But can Common Core standards move us closer to the intellectual coherence that Noonan agrees is missing? Can they bring more instructional effectiveness to our schools? We still think so. It is certainly way too early to conclude that the answer is no.

Kudos to Andy Rotherham and Chad Aldeman for taking on, via a nifty new website and this recent Washington Post article, the pressing (and underreported) issue of teacher-pension reform. Before you yawn, at least take note that due to extraordinarily long vesting periods—which, conveniently, help out lawmakers who haven’t properly funded their state’s pension plans—more than half of all teachers won’t qualify for even a minimal pension. As in other fields nowadays, barely a quarter of Maryland’s teachers will stay in this line of work for a full career—and a whopping 57 percent will leave without seeing a penny in pension benefits. Capable young folks who might otherwise try their hand in the classroom cannot be blamed for thinking twice about taking the plunge. Now that you’re awake, get educated.

In last weekend’s New York Times magazine, Paul Tough (of How Children Succeed fame) looked at why so many low-income students drop out of college. Just a quarter of college freshmen whose families are in the bottom half of the income distribution will obtain a bachelor’s degree by the time they are twenty-four years old, while nearly 90 percent of their classmates born in the top income quartile will do so. Tough identifies a number of factors at play, from family obligations and expectations to simply becoming overwhelmed by financial-aid paperwork. He also describes an innovative, and apparently successful, initiative at the University of Texas to provide greater support to disadvantaged students. Yet he barely touches one of the most obvious drivers of the college completion gap: the preparation gap. Simply put, low-income students are coming into many universities with lower SAT scores, weaker skills, thinner knowledge, and less experience in challenging courses. That’s an issue we can’t simply wish away.

After considering whether their support of the Common Core has turned them gay, Mike and Checker get serious, discussing how young teachers are getting the short end of the stick with regard to teacher pensions and why so many low-income students drop out of college. Amber wonders why well-off U.S. students do poorly on internationally benchmarked exams.

Amber's Research Minute

Not just the problem of other people’s children: U.S. student performance in global perspective by Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann, (Program on Education Policy and Governance andEducation Next, May 2014).

America’s educational shortcomings are not limited to disadvantaged kids. Far from it, as Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann explain in this recently released Education Next/PEPG study. Looking at the NAEP scores in every U.S. state and the PISA results of all thirty-four OECD countries, Hanushek et al. compared the math proficiency rates of students by parental education level: low (neither parent has a high school diploma), moderate (at least one parent has a high school diploma, but neither has a college degree), and high (at least one parent has a college degree). The results, from an American perspective, were pretty grim at every level. Overall, 35 percent of U.S. students are proficient in math, placing us twenty-seventh. For the most disadvantaged students, things are actually a bit rosier: we rank twentieth. The whopper, however, is the comparative proficiency of our most advantaged students: they fall in at a dismal twenty-eighth place—worse than the country’s overall rank. In other words, advantaged U.S. students appear to be doing comparatively worse internationally than students with less-educated parents. This is the opposite of what many low-score apologists—and suburban parents—would like you to believe. (Try explaining that with poverty.) Fortunately, there’s a little bit of state-level good news. Advantaged students from Massachusetts, for example, rank just outside the top five internationally, with a 62 percent proficiency rate. And disadvantaged students in Texas have a 28 percent proficiency rate, placing them seventh internationally. For the country, however, the picture is decidedly distressing. The persistence of our country’s economic prominence depends on American students receiving world-class educations. They aren’t getting that today.

SOURCE: Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann, Not just the problem of other people’s children: U.S. student performance in global perspective (Program on Education Policy and Governance and Education Next, May 2014).

The education-reform movement is experiencing a rapid acceleration, mainly fueled by great strides in expanding school choice. The number of charter schools in the U.S. has nearly quadrupled in little more than ten years, for instance, and private-school choice is on the rise. But as the efforts pick up speed, a human-capital gap has emerged: according to this report from the nonprofit leadership-training group EdFuel, the “autonomous and accountable public school sector” (a term the authors use to mean public charter schools and private schools accepting students with publicly funded vouchers) will need to fill 32,000 senior and mid-level (non-instructional) roles by 2023. EdFuel finds that the five fastest-growing roles are in instructional coaching, policy, legal areas, advocacy and outreach, and program implementation. To fill this human-capital gap, EdFuel prescribes four actions. First, because current career pipelines aren’t providing talent pools that are deep and diverse enough, recruitment ought to be ramped up—especially in the five top sectors listed above. Second, the sector needs to focus on growing management talent via PD for “rising stars” and “sector switchers.” Third, the sector ought to engage with city leadership to help recruit and keep top talent. And fourth, sector leaders should keep an eye on local politics; without political will, the sector will weaken and talent will head to cities with smoother roads.

SOURCE: EdFuel, Map the Gap: Confronting The Leadership Talent Gap in The New Urban Education Ecosystem (Washington, DC: EdFuel, April 2014).