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The Daily Signal
Why States Are
Leaving Common Core in Droves
Jude Schwalbach
September 20, 2018
After less than 10 years in the classroom, Common Core could soon be on
its way out.
The Obama administration introduced Common Core in 2010, imposing
burdensome new standards and tests in an attempt to create uniform
educational content across the nation. Despite loud objections from
parents, teachers, school leaders, and state officials, 46 states
ultimately adopted the standards due to a combination of funding
carrots and regulatory sticks.
But over the past few years, states have begun to reclaim their
authority to set educational standards. Approximately a quarter of
participating states have either downgraded their participation or
withdrawn completely from the two new testing consortia introduced by
Common Core.
One of those consortia—the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for
College and Career—once had 20 state participants but now has fewer
than four. Florida, for instance, an early adopter of Common Core,
withdrew from the test consortium after finding that, among other
issues, testing would occur over a 20-day period.
Maryland became the most recent state to roll back Common Core testing
when officials there found that it overburdened teachers and didn’t
help families.
How exactly? As The Baltimore Sun noted, it required schools to “clear
their schedules for several weeks each spring, disrupting classes, and
provide computers for students to take the tests in grades 3 through 8,
as well as twice in high school.” Teachers lost valuable class time and
encountered extensive disruptions.
Moreover, the test results were not delivered until the summer after
the end of classes, thus limiting the ability of teachers to use the
scores to improve classroom practice.
Maryland now plans to replace Common Core partnership tests with the
Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program—a shorter program that
delivers test results sooner. While it remains an open question how
much of a genuine departure from Common Core this represents, Maryland
is at least taking the first step in reclaiming its autonomy by
defining how it will assess student progress.
After all, states are much better suited to evaluate students according
to standards that parents care about. National standards like Common
Core give priority to national testing, but most parents typically
ascribe little value to such large-scale assessments. According to an
American Enterprise Institute study, parents rank school safety,
values, healthy environment, and curricula as significantly more
important than school performance on state tests.
In fact, national standards don’t actually help families or local
schools improve their education—they only help number-crunching
officials who distribute funding. My colleagues, Lindsey Burke and
Jennifer Marshall, have written that parents can gain more useful
information from classroom assessments and conversations with teachers
about their child’s education.
Moreover, Common Core standards actually encouraged mediocrity rather
than higher academic achievement. As Burke and Marshall have noted,
“The rigor and content of national standards will tend to align with
the mean among states” since the national standards will be plagued by
“the same pressures that detract[ed] from the quality of many state
standards.”
Educators also say federal standards and assessments limit their own
autonomy and capacity to innovate in the classroom. In his book “The
Tyranny of Metrics,” Jerry Z. Muller writes, “Many teachers perceive
the regimen created by the culture of testing and measured
accountability as robbing them of their autonomy and of the ability to
use their discretion and creativity in designing and implementing the
curriculum of their students.”
By returning education to the local level, teachers and parents can
work together to create the system that works best for their children.
Rather than following Washington’s dictates, states should reassert
their standards-setting and assessment authority to better enable
schools to respond to local families and teachers.
Maryland’s decision to replace these tests is a step in the right
direction as the state works to re-establish how it will conduct
assessments. Freed from the constraints of Washington, states can then
look to each other for best practices and innovations while working
with local communities to produce results.
One way states can solidify their own educational standards is by
strengthening school transparency measures modeled after the
independent reviews that are common in higher education, such as the
Princeton Review or College Board. This would empower parents with
clear information about school performance, enabling them to hold
schools accountable for meeting the needs of their children,
particularly when empowered with education choice options.
Maryland has not yet released the costs of its new tests, but other
states that have similarly withdrawn from the Partnership for
Assessment of Readiness for College and Career paid a hefty price to
replace it. For instance, Florida spent $220 million on a new test,
meaning taxpayers there are still paying to get out of Common Core.
More states should follow Maryland’s path and extricate themselves from
the massive federal overreach that is Common Core. Greater transparency
coupled with real choice in education—not centralized government—will
strengthen education in states across the country.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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