2012-01-20 @ admin
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative continues to gather strength. But the evidence presented by its developers—the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)—seems lacking compared to the independent reviews and the available research on the topic that suggest otherwise.
Evidence-based or data-driven decision making has been at the forefront of education rhetoric for the past 15 years. Administrator
preparation programs have courses on the topic, and preservice teachers are taught to use evidence and data to inform instruction. Many schools have “data committees” that make school-wide decisions. The No Child Left Behind Act includes the word data 230 times. Surely there must be some quality data available to support the use of the CCSS to transform, standardize, and centralize America’s education system.
I wondered whether the official Web site for the CCSS provided such evidence. The site does claim that the standards are “evidence based” and lists two documents to prove it: Myths v. Facts about the Common Core Standards and a Benchmarking for Success report. The Myths document presents claims that the standards have “made careful use of a large and growing body of evidence.” Evidence derives from scientific experiments and discoveries; thus, one would expect to find references to high-quality empirical research to support the standards. When I investigated that “large and growing body of evidence” offered by NGA and CCSSO, I found that it was not large and, in fact, was built mostly on the Benchmarking for Success report, which was created by the same groups that created the standards.
I always look at the references an author chooses to use as my quick indicator of a study’s quality. The Benchmarking report has 138 endnotes, some of which are repetitive references. Of the 138 cited pieces of evidence, four could be considered empirical studies related directly to the topic of national standards and student achievement. The remaining citations were newspaper stories, magazine
articles, book chapters, notes from telephone interviews, and several tangential studies. Many of the various citations were linked to a small group of advocates and did not represent the larger body of thought on the subject. The Benchmarking report, the main source of evidence provided by the NGA and CCSSO, draws most of its support from one study: The Role of Cognitive Skills in Economic Development. The use of that study is troubling because it has been criticized exhaustively and shown to be fatally flawed by independent researchers.
There is no empirical basis for the CCSS initiative, and yet many policy makers and even educators support it. The idea is easy to champion because it appears straightforward, compartmentalized, and uncomplicated. However, keep in mind that education is as complex as other disciplines. For example, if your child’s doctor made a high-stakes medical decision without consulting high-quality evidence or experimented on your child without your consent and without informing you of the known negative consequences, we would call that medical malpractice. Is this a case of education malpractice? At a minimum, it is irresponsible and unprofessional given the amount of evidence that calls the CCSS into question.
Developing coherent education and social policy is difficult. The Common Core Standards presents itself as a neat and clean solution, easily manageable, and easy to discuss. Unfortunately, the real world is messy and much more complex. We cannot eliminate the complexity of educating all students by putting forth superficial ideas. Based on the lack of evidence behind the CCSS, it seems uninformed and unethical to support such a massive social experiment on participants who have no voice and thus no choice but to go along.