Today, I happened upon a decades-old Rand Corporation report (McLaughlin and Berman, 1975) on the topic of educational change and school-level implementation. Of the many interesting and important tidbits of information in this report, I found this quote striking—and perhaps most relevant—for Common Core implementation:
“Indifferent and unreceptive environments were frequent in our sample of projects attempted in upper-level schools. . . . Change agent projects that included the higher grade levels experienced severe management and administrative problems as well as teacher resistance. For example, reading projects that spanned all grade levels consistently encountered resistance at the upper-level schools as they attempted to persuade science or history teachers to view themselves as teachers of reading.”
According to the Rand report, high schools exhibited more hostility to change than elementary schools, largely because of teacher resistence. High school teachers, the researchers found, "perceive themselves as having large intellectual and emotional investments in academic purity." As such, high school teachers, who often teach specialized subjects (i.e., biology or U.S. history), have less motivation to work outside their "solid subject" area, try "new ideas," and thus act as "change agents."
In 2014-15, Ohio will fully transition to the Common Core in math and English language arts for all grade levels, K-12. So, changing course from an all-grade-level implementation to a graduated implementation (elementaries first and high schools later) would be nearly impossible. The Rand findings, however, should raise awareness that high schools may strongly resist the Common Core. As a result, Common Core implementers should pay special attention to how the Common Core is implemented in Ohio's high schools.
