Common Core: Explained and Critiqued (from AFA Journal, September 2018)

Early approval of Common Core

Enthusiasm and agreement marked the plans by the nation’s governors and state educational leaders to produce a set of common standards that public schools could unify around. Some of the ambitious goals for Common Core State Standards were that all students who graduated from high school would be ready for college work or for careers; the achievement gaps between racial and socioeconomic groups would narrow; and U.S. students would maintain high rankings on international achievement tests.

 

A rushed beginning

The standards were written in 2009. Although Federal law prohibits the Department of Education from directing state curricula, the billions of dollars in federal grants, known as “Race to the Top,” were huge incentives for states to quickly commit to the Common Core standards and their requirements (sometimes sight unseen). By the fall of 2010, forty-six states and the District of Columbia were attempting to put the standards into practice.

 

Signs of problems

Almost immediately there were signs of problems from unhappy parents, students, and teachers. Angela Hill, a parent, former teacher, and state senator for Mississippi, has been an opponent of the program from the beginning. She reported in debates about Common Core in the state legislature that she had “heard from numerous parents, teachers, and students complaining about the ELA, as well as the math standards, as well as the recommended teaching methods.”

 

Teachers soon realized that their teaching skills and knowledge were being graded on how well their students performed on annual standardized achievement tests. They felt increasing pressure to just teach to the test. According to Diane Ravitch in a speech to the Modern Language Association (Jan. 11, 2014), teachers were being evaluated, and often demoralized, by their students’ achievements scores. She also noted that field tests in real classrooms could have detected many of the problems reported by parents, teachers, and students, but there were none before the standards were already implemented.¹

 

During 2016 as Donald Trump campaigned around the country prior to the presidential elections, his promises to help get rid of Common Core was greeted with enthusiastic cheers and applause.

 

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, is given to a cross-section of students nationwide every two years. It is considered a reliable way to compare academic performance for fourth grade reading and math and for eighth grade reading and math across the states. Students are placed in three groups: advanced, proficient, and basic, with students also shown who are below basic. Test results show that average math scores slowly increased from 2000 through 2007, with the average scaled scores increasing from 226 to 240. In spite of small fluctuations from 2009 through 2017, the average score has remained virtually unchanged at 240. The average fourth grade reading scaled scores followed a similar pattern.

 

Neither fourth grade math nor fourth grade reading scores have improved very much on NAEP tests since Common Core began, and the socioeconomic status (SES)/racial achievement gaps have failed to narrow since 2011.²

 

ACT: The Condition of College and Career Readiness 2017

The four basic ACT College Readiness Benchmarks are English, Reading, Math, and Science. For the past few years, the reports have shown that about forty percent of high school graduates met the cut off scores for three or four of the benchmarks. However, a sizeable number of the remaining sixty percent of graduates showed minimal readiness for college coursework. “Since 2003, the percentage of ACT-tested graduates who met or surpassed the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks has increased in reading, stayed relatively steady in science, and declined in both English and mathematics.”³

 

Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS)

Another one of the goals of Common Core was to improve the ranking of American students on international standardized tests. The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an international assessment of the reading skills of representative samples of fourth- and eighth- grade students that is given every five years in many countries. Results of the 2011 PIRLS test was compared to the 2016 PIRLS test. U.S. students dropped from fifth in the world to thirteenth.⁴

 

Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is given every four years to sample groups of fourth- and eighth-grade students. The results of the fourth grade math scores from 2003 to 2011 showed a gradual increase for all groups. From 2011 to 2015, the top quartile continued to increase, but the average and the lower percentiles decreased. Overall, the U.S. fourth graders dropped from 11^th in the world in 2011 to 14^th in the world in 2015^{. 5}

 

Focus on Achievement test gaps

Interestingly, faith and family come into the big picture in a big way. That is no surprise to those who hold to the traditions of the Founding Fathers.

 

Dr. William Jeynes, professor of education at California State University-Long Beach, as been researching student achievement gaps for many years. He recently compiled a meta-analysis of existing research projects on this problem going back to the early 1960s to try and find the common denominators.

 

His study stunned many educators. Jeynes’s research found that new teaching methods and programs did not have major effects on this problem. Amazingly, what the research did reveal is that a student’s religious faith (specifically Christianity) has the greatest impact on reducing achievement gaps. Family structure was the second most important factor in effectively narrowing the racial and socioeconomic gaps.

 

“Perhaps most interestingly, when the two factors were combined (if low SES children of color were religious and came from intact families), the achievement gap totally disappeared.”⁶

 

With increasing approval of post-modern philosophies, some schools no longer support traditional family structure, and others try to eliminate all references to Christianity in such things as Christmas music selections, classroom writing assignments, and graduation speeches—falsely claiming there must be “separation of church and state” in schools. These self-defeating policies likely make the achievement gap problem worse.

 

Leader’s perspective

The 2016 ACT National Curriculum Survey is given to thousands of K-12 teachers and college instructors to determine which skills and knowledge in English/writing, mathematics, reading, and science are being taught and which are considered essential for students to be ready for college and career. One of the 2016 findings was that college professors, in general, found that recent incoming students were able to analyze and summarize the opinions of others, but were often not able to generate and write original, sound ideas of their own^{. 7}

 

Dr. Terrence Moore, former professor of history at Hillsdale College and a national leader in the classical school movement, states, “the standards take away the ‘great stories’ of our heritage of Western civilization and Christianity, and replace them with post-modern cynicism and political correctness.” Moore is concerned about what are on the “exemplar texts” for the Common Core English standards, as well as the large number of traditional classics that are not on the list. He maintains that the classic articles and books are a huge influence on students in shaping morals and character.

 

Moore sadly notes that selections of the classics, when included in a lesson, are often no more than a few selected pages that are covered in one day; if they present a conservative viewpoint, they may be compared with a modern author who has a liberal viewpoint. He further notes that time for good reading is wasted on nonproductive projects and is being squeezed by increasing amounts of “Information Texts.” His frank conclusion is, “The Common Core is clearly hostile to Christianity, to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, to traditional ideas of manhood and womanhood, to marriage and the family, to the idea of America’s unique example in the world, to any lesson about life and liberty that could be taught to us by a ‘dead white man’.”⁸ Although schools in conservative communities can, and do, reject many of the more liberal selections, Moore sees Common Core as a vehicle that can influence students to accept anti-Christian, anti-American beliefs.

 

Robert Knight writes in The Washington Times that there is an increasing animosity toward America and free market capital among many younger Americans. He references author William J. Federer, who says this is no accident. Rather it is the result of conditioning in both the elementary and secondary schools that continues into universities—tactics such as being hypercritical of America’s history and failing to appreciate the genius of our Constitution^{. 9}

 

States Beginning to Repeal Common Core Commitment

A number of states have repealed the Standards and are in the process of writing new state standards and finding new achievement tests. Some states seem to be happy with the Common Core standards as they are. Others have found ways to override the copyright that only allows a 15% change in the standards, and have made numerous adjustments that are more in line with their state values. ¹⁰

 

Changing a state’s educational standards and curricula is an expensive and time-consuming process. Replacing achievement tests that reflect what is taught by the state may be the biggest problem. These tests often line up with Common Core, and low scores might indicate that teachers were doing a poor job of teaching.

 

If parents would like to see Common Core repealed or altered in their state, they should contact their local legislators and ask for open hearings or surveys on the standards, this time with input from local and state educators, parents, and students.

 

References

1. Valerie Strauss, Everything you need to know about Common Core—Ravitch. The Washington Post, January 18, 2014. Washington Post, 2014

 

2. The Nation’s Report Card. 2017 Results. Retrieved from www. nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2017_highlights.

 

3. ACT: The Condition of College and Career Readiness 2017. Retrieved from https://www.act.org/content/act/en/research/condition-of-college-and-career-readiness-2017.html

 

4. Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pirls/pirls2016/

 

5. Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) Retreived from

http://nces.ed.gov/timss/tims2015

 

6. William Jeynes, Shrinking the Achievement GAP. Teachers of Vision, March 7, 2018.

 

7. Valerie Strauss, Common Core isn’t preparing students very well for college or career, new report says. The Washington Post, June 9, 2016.

 

8. Terrence O. Moore, The Story-Killers: A Common-Sense Case Against Common Core (Kindle Edition, 2013-11-29), 8.

 

9. Robert Knight. Deconstructing Young Minds. The Washington Times. June 10, 2018.

 

10. Jill Norton, Common Core Revisions: What Are States Really Changing? EdTechTimes, posted on February 15, 2017.

This article was published in the September 2018 issue of the AFA Journal.