Primer, November 2009
November 2009 Volume 4, Number 9
Editor’s note: Like most of the country, Ohio has been wrestling with how it might use academic standards to improve student performance and help schools align curriculum and expectations. A recent one-day conference on World-Class Academic Standards for Ohio, which we co-sponsored, featured education experts exploring current national common standards efforts and the work of top-performing states. Last month, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute released its assessment of the public draft of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. The report, Stars by Which to Navigate: Scanning National and International Education Standards in 2009, assigned letter grades to the standards for the two subject areas that were released and used the same criteria to grade other reading/writing and mathematics standards. To underscore the importance of this issue, we share a summary of the report’s conclusions.
How the draft Common Core standards
stack up against existing benchmarks
By Sheila Byrd Carmichael, W. Stephen Wilson, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Amber M. Winkler
For the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
It might actually happen. Planets and stars are beginning to align. Dare we say it? Some sort of national education standards could become a reality.
If so, it will have been a long time in the making — at least half a century. In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called for “national goals” in education, including “standards.” A decade later, President Richard M. Nixon called “the fear of ‘national standards’” one of the “bugaboos of education.” In 1983, President Ronald W. Reagan accepted from his first education secretary A Nation at Risk, which sounded an alarm about the parlous condition of U.S. academic standards and arguably catalyzed twenty-five years of standards-based reform. In 1988, with the collaboration of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, President Reagan presided over the reinvention of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), complete with state-by-state comparisons of student achievement and what became known as “achievement levels” by which NAEP data are now reported, a close relative of national standards.
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush assembled the governors in Charlottesville where they agreed to the first national education “goals” in U.S. history. He also paid for development of “voluntary national standards” in core subjects, only to see the Senate vehemently denounce the draft U.S. history standards—and most of the others crash and burn, too. President Bill Clinton later pushed for voluntary national testing, only to see a disgruntled House pull the plug on their funding. Then, in 2001, President George W. Bush and Congress teamed up to enact No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which embraced standards-based reform and testing—just not national standards and national tests. It turned out, however, that the hodge-podge of state standards and tests, some of them world-class rigorous, some downright embarrassing, made a mockery of NCLB’s 2014 drop-dead deadline by which all American youngsters would be “proficient” in reading and math.
September 2009 found President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, also faulting NCLB for discouraging “high learning standards” and even “inadvertently encourag[ing] states to lower them.”
Though not everyone yet agrees, one solution now gathering force is development of a set of “common” core academic standards for the United States, much like most high-performing countries already have. That’s a heavy lift, to be sure, but the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), in partnership with Achieve, ACT, and the College Board, have embarked on just such an undertaking.
Known as the “Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI),” the goal of this state-led initiative is to develop common standards in reading/writing/listening/speaking and mathematics for grades K-12. (Science may eventually follow.) Governors and commissioners of education from nearly every state have already pledged some level of commitment to this initiative though no one’s yet quite sure what that means.
In mid-September, CCSSI released a “public draft” of end-of-high-school standards in those two subjects, and asked for comments within thirty days. Further revisions will doubtless follow. Meanwhile, drafting teams are beginning to “backward map” the standards down through earlier grades.
Nobody knows how all of this will turn out, but we think it’s worth pitching in to try to help make it turn out well—while reserving final judgment until we see the final product….
We enlisted four top-notch experts, individuals who not only possess deep content expertise in their respective fields, but who have also rolled up their sleeves to work with state officials and classroom teachers to ensure that state standards are crafted and implemented with integrity.
Subject-matter experts reviewed the content, rigor, and clarity of the first public drafts of the “Common Core” standards. Using the same criteria, the same experts also reviewed the reading/writing and mathematics frameworks of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS); and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Letter grades were awarded to each.
The goal is to help U.S. educators and policymakers to judge the respective merits of these influential standards, de facto standards, and possible future standards. In particular, how do the draft Common Core standards stack up alongside extant national and international benchmarks?
Here are the grades:
- Common Core Reading/Writing/Speaking/Listening: B
- Common Core Mathematics: B
- NAEP Reading: B and NAEP Writing: B
- NAEP Mathematics: C
- TIMSS Mathematics: A
- PISA Mathematics: D
- PISA Reading: D
Here are the key findings, organized by framework:
Common Core reading/writing/listening standards (September 2009 draft)
The drafters have done a praiseworthy job of defining essential competencies in reading, writing, and speaking and listening for success in both college and the workplace. They are also to be commended for not falling prey to spurious postmodern theories that disavow close reading and encourage interpretations of a text based solely on how it makes the reader feel. Further, the document properly acknowledges that essential communication skills must be embraced and addressed beyond the English classroom, which could lead to valuable collaboration among teachers and more consistent expectations across subjects.
These skill-centric standards do not, however, suffice to frame a complete English or language arts curriculum. Proper standards for English must also provide enough content guidance to help teachers instill not just useful skills, but also imagination, wonder, and a deep appreciation for our literary heritage. Despite their many virtues, these skills-based competencies cannot serve as a strong framework for the robust liberal arts curricula that will prepare young Americans to thrive as citizens in a free society. States adopting these standards must, therefore, be very careful about how they supplement them so as to achieve that goal.
Common Core mathematics standards (September 2009 draft)
The draft covers most of the critical content and is coherent, organized, and clearly written. However, the standards are not explicit enough in how they address the arithmetic of rational numbers. Further, they do not set priorities, which means that readers are unable to discern which standards should be given more or less attention than others. As a result, many standards that will contribute little to college readiness are given equal status with standards that are essential foundations.
NAEP Reading and Writing
NAEP’s (separate but related) reading and writing frameworks function satisfactorily as the foundation for developing national, matrix-sample assessments of U.S. fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders’ basic skills in these crucial areas. But as models for national and state standards they fall short of the mark.
The reading framework is generally clear and usable but could be more specific and detailed in ways that would also improve its content. The frameworks do not place enough emphasis on literature and English language conventions, nor do they distinguish the most desirable skill targets at each grade span. Making such revisions would help practitioners distinguish between more and less important content.
The writing framework also has shortcomings. Though the content is covered satisfactorily overall, more specificity at each level and more attention to writing conventions would help make the framework as rigorous as it should be. The guidelines for writing tasks are straightforward and coherent, and the sample prompts help to clarify expectations, but greater specificity at these important benchmark grades would also help indicate to educators what expectations should look like at intervening grades.
NAEP Mathematics
Though the NAEP mathematics framework contains most of the important content we would expect students to learn, that content is hidden within an excessive number of standards (nearly 300). Less important material, such as data analysis, statistics, and probability, receives greater emphasis than more important material, like symbolic algebra. Throughout the document, important content standards are given the same status as secondary standards. Often standards containing crucial content are written in a way that also includes minor content, which makes it hard to identify the former. Over half of the tandards would benefit from rewriting as they include unnecessary verbiage or mathematically meaningless language, or simply lack focus.
TIMSS Mathematics
The TIMSS standards for both fourth and eighth grade math are clear, coherent, and well organized. They provide solid guidance to readers and users; they are measurable and burdened by very little jargon. They cover nearly all of the required content at appropriate levels of rigor. Excellent decisions have been made about what content to include and exclude, and there is little ambiguity about what is expected. Minor corrections to the pattern standards and inclusion of some missing standards would raise the score for TIMSS to a perfect ten.
PISA Mathematics
The PISA mathematics framework and explanations do not cover the appropriate grade-level material and the released items indicate that the exam is quite weak in mathematical content. Further, PISA developers give only a vague description of what they mean by “mathematical literacy.” This is a problem-solving test and, although mathematics is used, that seems almost incidental. Many problems have no apparent mathematical content. Because of this low level of required content knowledge, the claim that PISA tests “preparedness for further study” is rather dubious. Further, the test itself is unbalanced, overemphasizing data display. Most of the content that is expected of a 15-year-old on PISA is what younger students should have already mastered.
As a serious problem-solving test using elementary mathematics, the PISA assessment might function nicely. However, results from PISA ought not to be used to interpret how successful a school system is at imparting grade-level mathematical knowledge and understanding, nor are the PISA framework and released items a suitable model for U.S. standards setters at any level.
PISA Reading
The PISA Reading Framework suffers from a number of problems. It does not address vocabulary development; offer specific expectations for reading and analyzing literary and non-literary texts; include specific expectations for the correct use of English language conventions; recognize the importance of literary heritage; or sufficiently define the amount, quality, and complexity of literary and informational texts that students should read. Much of the content focuses on metacognitive strategies for accessing information and addresses neither reading comprehension nor other critically important strands of English language arts that should be delineated in a set of strong national or state English standards for the U.S. (e.g., literature, writing, research, grammar and conventions, communication skills, etc.). Moreover, the framework is dense and murky, including multiple (and unnecessary) levels of detail about task types. Without any graphical explanation, it’s difficult to follow and not helpful for informing curriculum and instruction.
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These interim findings will be supplemented in spring 2010. Part II of this report will include science and history reviews as well as updated versions of some of the international frameworks and (provided these are available for review) appraisals of revised Common Core standards for end-of-high-school as well as earlier grades. Standards from the American College Testing Program (ACT), College Board, and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) will also be added.
About the Author
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a nonprofit organization that conducts research, issues publications, and directs action projects in elementary and secondary education reform at the national level and in Ohio, with special emphasis on its hometown of Dayton. It is affiliated with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and this publication is a joint project of the Foundation and the Institute.