Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by Williamson M. Evers & Ze’ev Wurman)

A consortium to develop a set of “research-based and internationally benchmarked” college and career-ready standards in mathematics and in English-language arts (ELA) was established earlier this year by the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), in partnership with Achieve, the College Board, and ACT.

This consortium was presented as a voluntary effort by the states, and in this way, it claimed to avoid the statutory prohibition of a federally-imposed national curriculum. So far 48 states (all except Alaska and Texas) have joined the initiative, and the consortium released its first draft of its proposed high-school “college and career readiness” standards late this last September.  Nonetheless, the Texas chief state school officer calls this project an effort “by the U. S. Department of Education” to impose “a national curriculum and testing system” and “a step toward a federal takeover” of public schools across the nation.

However, all is not well with the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), as the effort has come to be known. In fact, many of the early concerns about such a national effort have materialized. They have to do both with the process and with the content.

In terms of process, the identity of the actual authors of the “college and career readiness” standards was kept secret for a long time and, when the names were finally published, it became clear that CCSSI had included few subject-matter experts among them. Only after early ones were leaked to the public in July did CCSSI finally publish its official draft “college and career readiness standards” for ELA and mathematics in September.  CCSSI finally also published the names of the members of its various committees, but these seem to keep growing in number and their membership changing.

CCSSI’s timeline calls for supplementing its “college and career readiness” standards with grade-by-grade K-12 standards, with the entire effort to be finished by “early 2010.” This schedule is supposed to include drafting, review, and public comment. As anyone who had to do such a task knows, such a process for a single state takes many months, and CCSSI’s timeline raises deep concerns about whether the public and the states can provide in-depth feedback on those standards–and, more important, whether standards that are of high quality can possibly emerge from the non-transparent process CCSSI is using.

The situation is, not surprisingly, worse on the content side. The proposed English-Language Arts “college and career readiness” standards (which we are told are not high school graduation standards) are largely a list of content-free generic skills. Rather than focusing on what English teachers are trained to teach (quality literature), the drafters seem to expect English teachers to teach reading strategies presumed to help students to cope with biology or economics textbooks.

In mathematics, the standards are perhaps even worse. While essentially all four-year state colleges require at least three years of high school mathematics, including Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Geometry or above, CCSSI’s standards require only Algebra 1 and few bits and pieces from Algebra 2 and Geometry. In other words, students who graduate from high school having taken only math coursework addressing those standards (and presumably having passed a test based on them) will be inadmissible to any four-year college around the country.

This ill-advised rush to have national standards ready by early 2010 is driven by the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top (RttT) $4 billion competitive-grant fund. Its final regulations, published in November, give a strong advantage to states that develop and adopt “common standards,” and, in these hard economic times, states will not be easily able to justify declining to pursue this money.

In late November, 2009, the Texas chief state school officer complained—quite justifiably on the face of it—that Texas is being discriminated against by the RttT criteria because it chose not to join the wild  rush to the standards. And indeed a wild rush it is. A bill introduced at the beginning of December in the California legislature to qualify the state for the RttT money proposes adopting CCSSI’s standards sight unseen.  Not even a complete draft of the grade-by grade standards has been finished yet.

Yet, if the President and Congress are going to use carrots and sticks to create national standards, we need to look for a way out of the current Common Core morass. The federal rules for the RttT money could not and do not explicitly require the adoption of CCSSI’s standards. Instead, the rules provide a general requirement:  States are to participate in a “consortium of states” that is developing a common set of K–12 standards which are “internationally benchmarked” and tied to “college and career readiness” and that includes “a significant number of States.”

Given the low goals of the “college and career readiness” standards proposed by CCSSI– to judge by its September draft–it makes sense to set up an alternative consortium.  That consortium would be composed of states whose standards have been highly rated by academic experts– like California or Massachusetts — together with states like Texas and Alaska whose reluctance to jump on the Common Core bandwagon has been clearly vindicated.

The new consortium would endeavor to create better and more rigorous academic standards than those of the CCSSI. These alternative standards will be truly internationally benchmarked. With over twenty per cent of the American population, such a consortium of states would easily qualify as “significant” as well. Such states might even be joined by other states that do not want to embrace the intellectually impoverished and internationally uncompetitive Common Core standards.

Drab and mediocre national standards will retard the efforts of advanced states like Massachusetts and reduce academic expectations for students in all states.

Yes, it is late in the game. But this should not be an excuse for us to accept the inferior standards that at present seem to be coming from the rushed effort of CCSSO and NGA.

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Williamson M. Evers is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for policy. Ze’ev Wurman is a former senior policy adviser in the U.S. Department of Education.

As I reviewed my 9th grader’s required reading list for English class I saw good and bad news.  The good news is he is reading some excellent literature, including Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men, Night and To Kill a Mockingbird.  The bad news is that these works are remarkably gloomy. 

To Kill a Mockingbird is the most upbeat of the bunch and can at its most positive be described as a bittersweet recollection of childhood and at its most negative a horrifying tale of the lynching of an innocent man.  The other books are more consistently downbeat, featuring mutual suicide, killing an innocent retarded man, and the holocaust.

I know that the world can be a nasty place and I know that great literature tends to explore that nastiness.  But I have to wonder whether it is really such a good idea to require our moody adolescents to read a steady stream of such depressing works.

Can I suggest that we break-up the persistent gloom by substituting some more upbeat books?  Maybe students could read Measure for Measure instead of Romeo and Juliet.  Measure for Measure would appeal to youthful resistance to authority without modeling overwrought teen crushes.  Maybe schools could add some Kurt Vonnegut, which softens the gloom with absurdist humor.

Don’t get me wrong, I think my child’s reading list is pretty typical and I like everything on it.  I’m just wondering if people have thought about how downbeat the list is.

I don’t understand why enthusiasts of curricular or pedagogical reforms feel the need to pick fights with choice supporters.  Are they so starved for attention that they need to create a phony conflict about whether focusing on choice or curriculum is a more effective strategy for school improvement?

I say that this is a phony conflict because there is no necessary tension between expanding choice and competition in education and spreading the adoption of more effective curriculum and pedagogical practices.  In fact, the two strategies should usually complement each other nicely.  Given that the educational establishment is hostile to reforms proposed by backers of Core Knowledge, phonics-based reading instruction, etc…, the best way to expand access of students to these alternative approaches is to allow them to choose charter or voucher schools where they are more likely to find these alternatives.  We can expand access to Core Knowledge by expanding access to choice.

But curriculum reform enthusiasts often seem uncomfortable with choice.  What if people choose the wrong thing?  Wouldn’t it be much better if we just made everyone adopt the right approach?

The problem with this strategy is that it reflects an amazing amount of political naivete.  If someone were in a position to impose a single curriculum and pedagogy, through national testing, standards, and restricted choice, why would they assume that their view of the desirable curriculum would be the one to prevail?   Opponents of Core Knowledge, phonics, etc… are much better positioned politically to control national testing and standards.  Even if the reformers could gain control over those centralized institutions for a period of time, they can’t simply assume that they would remain forever in control.

It’s time for the curriculum people to suppress these periodic inventions of a phony conflict with choice supporters.  The vast majority of choice supporters are sympathetic to the goals of curriculum reformers and we can make much better progress if we work together than if we get drawn into these phony fights.

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The headline in the New York Times says it all “Study Finds that Online Learning Beats the Classroom.”

Money quote:

“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.

Echoes of Clayton Christensen, anyone?

I haven’t had a chance to read the study yet, but it looks like a meta analysis and finds:

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

Nine national percentile points is a very large difference in my book.  To put that in perspective, the highest scoring state in the country (MA) outscores the lowest (MS) by about 13.4% on the 4th grade reading NAEP.

I’ll write more after examining the study.