Understanding the Common Core: What it Is, What it Isn’t

According to proponents, common standards also ensure no states “dumb down” their expectations for students, a phenomenon in the wake of No Child Left Behind, which sanctioned schools that didn’t meet certain academic benchmarks. Finally, many advocates point to benefits of common standards for students who move frequently, such as those from military families.

At the first National Education Summit, in 1996, the nation’s business leaders and governors pledged to work together to raise standards and achievement in public schools. They founded a nonprofit called Achieve and gave it a mission to work with states to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability.

The American Diploma Project, a working group composed of Achieve, the Fordham Institute, the National Alliance of Business and the Education Trust, published “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts” in 2004. They said their benchmarks in English and mathematics “should serve as the anchor for every state’s system of high school assessments and graduation requirements.”

In December 2008, a report by the National Governors Association, Council of Chief State School Officers and Achieve recommended that states adopt a common set of standards in math and English for grades K–12.

In 2009, the federal Race to the Top competitive grant program, funded as part of a recession-recovery initiative, rewarded states that, among other things, adopted common standards.

From there, the Common Core Standards Initiative was created with the support of governors from 48 states (all but Texas and Alaska). It brought together teams of writers who drafted the initial standards beginning with the creation of “college and career ready” standards, which spell out what high school graduates should know and be able to do. These were released for public comment in late 2009 at around the same time validation committees were formed to ensure the quality of the standards. The individual grade level K–12 standards went out for public comment in March 2010. The two major teachers’ unions were also consulted and provided teachers for the development and review process. The final standards — officially called The Common Core State Academic Standards — were released in June 2010.

The federal government played no role in creating the standards.

A report from The Fordham Institute, a right-of-center education think tank, evaluated the Common Core and all 50 states’ standards based on their content, rigor, clarity, and specificity. The Common Core got high marks, and were judged as better than or about as good as all 50 states’ math standards and 47 states’ English standards. However, Indiana, California, and Washington, D.C.’s English standards were labeled as clearly superior to the Common Core.  (The Fordham report has been criticized because it was funded in part by the Gates Foundation, which also supported the Common Core’s development.) There is some evidence that states that had math standards similar to the Common Core had higher test scores, and there is also evidence that the Common Core requires higher levels of critical thinking and problem solving than previous standards.

Standards are expectations for what students should know and be able to do; curriculum encompassess the materials and methods that teachers, schools, and districts use to reach those expectations.

For example, the Common Core sets a standard that kindergarten students should be able to solve addition and subtraction word problems with 10. The curriculum for how to teach students this — including choice of textbooks, worksheets, teaching practices and principles, etc — is not mandated by the Common Core and remains a local decision.

First, there’s the weirdness of some of the new Common Core–aligned material. The seemingly odd approach to basic math has garnered a lot of attention. For example, one viral Common Core problem featured a frustrated parent questioning the value of a complicated approach to a simple subtraction problem. (Though there is in fact a reason for the new Common Core methods.)

It’s unclear how many states would have adopted the Common Core without the federal incentives, though the fact that 48 states were part of the Common Core Standards Initiatives suggests that many would have.

The federal government has also offered waivers from No Child Left Behind  NCLB) to states that adopt college and career ready standards. The Common Core satisfies this waiver requirement, but other standards do as well. Several states that have not adopted the Common Core do have an NCLB waiver.

Surveys of the public at large have found mixed results. A 2014 poll found that 53 percent of the public supported the Common Core, with 26 percent opposed, and 21 percent undecided; the percent supportive had dropped from 65 percent in 2013. Democrats were much more supportive of the standards than Republicans. Still a narrow plurality of Republicans were in favor of the standards. But a February 2015 poll found that the standards were quite unpopular with just 17 percent of Americans supporting the Common Core.

Notably, the public has many misperceptions about the Common Core. The same survey that found limited support for the standards, reported that many people incorrectly believed that the Common Core covered sex education, global warming, and evolution.

Surveys in 2013 consistently showed that about three-quarters of teachers were at least somewhat supportive of the Common Core. However, recent data suggests support among teachers is falling, and that only about half of those surveyed now support the standards. For example a 2014 poll found that educator support for the standards had fallen from 76 percent to 46 percent in just a single year. A 2014 Gallup survey found teachers about evenly split in whether they viewed the standards positively or negatively. Gallup also found that many teachers still supported the goal of the standards, but were concerned about Common Core-aligned tests and were worried about and frustrated with the implementation of the standards.

At the 2014 AFT convention, a heated debate broke out about the standards with some members arguing that the union should disavow support altogether. Ultimately, the AFT reiterated its backing of the Common Core, emphasizing the need for more teacher input in the standards’ implementation.

The Common Core is much less controversial within the Democratic Party. President Obama’s administration has been a strong supporter and Hillary Clinton has already suggested that she backs the standards. Few if any prominent national Democrats have opposed the standards, though the Washington State Democratic Party has condemned the Common Core.

There are two sets of Common Core–aligned tests used by multiple states, the Partnership for Assessment of College and Career Readiness (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), which were funded in part by the federal government. The purpose of having multiple states use the same assessment was to ensure test quality, decrease the per-pupil cost of the exams, and allow comparability across states. In 2015, 10 states used PARCC and 18 used SBAC — though Ohio has since dropped PARCC and Maine and Missouri have dropped SBAC.

These assessments are controversial in many states, not just because of their relation to the standards. Some of the negative reaction has centered around Pearson, a for-profit company that creates and grades standardized tests in many states. Opponents of Pearson question the quality and transparency of their assessments.

The biggest driver of increased standardized testing may have been the federal government’s push for states to evaluate all teachers based on student test scores. This means that much of the growth in testing were in subjects other than math and English.

A study by the Fordham Institute, which supports the Common Core, estimated that the transition to the new standards would entail one-time transitional costs of between $3 and $12 billion nationally (or between 1.5 and 3 percent of total local, state, and federal education spending). The amount would include the costs of textbooks, assessments, and professional development, and would depend on whether districts used “traditional” approaches or bare-bones models such as free, online curriculum and virtual professional development programs.

In contrast, an estimate from the Pioneer Institute — a conservative, Boston-based think tank, which opposes the Common Core — put the price tag at more than $16 billion over seven years.