At Education Next, Eric Hanushek recently posed the question of whether our national educational obsession with Common Core standards over the last two years is merely a distraction. Hanushek argues that however they are configured, state learning standards probably don't have much to do with student outcomes.
Hanushek offered a chart correlating the quality of state learning standards (as measured by Education Week's "Quality Counts" report) with average state performance on the 8th grade mathematics portion of National Assessment of Educational Progress. Kentucky, with a strong Quality Counts score of 90.3 on learning standards, posted a fairly paltry NAEP score of just over 280, placing the state in the bottom third or so.
My friend Richard Innes, education analyst for the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy, has done some excellent work raising questions about what NAEP scores really tell us, so I'm not entirely confident in the significance of Hanushek's correlations. Nevertheless, I think he makes an excellent point that Common Core advocates have probably overstated their case for the importance of implementing national standards:
What really matters is what is actually taught in the classroom. Simply setting a different goal – even if backed by intensive professional development, new textbooks, and the like – has not historically had much influence as we look across state outcomes.
For Kentucky, I believe the Common Core standards offered better clarity and organization than our previous state curriculum, but as I have argued elsewhere, the Common Core fails utterly to offer a more prioritized curriculum of power standards. Without greater focus, these new standards are of limited value, despite the enormous amounts of time, money, and sweat teachers have poured into "deconstructing" and then implementing and assessing the new standards over the last two years.
What matters more, as Hanushek rightly argues, is what happens in the classroom. It's not that curriculum doesn't matter. I invest considerable energy in training aspiring administrators how to do high-quality, meaningful curriculum development and implementation. But assuming that curriculum can raise student performance in the absence of other factors like sound instructional practices, formative assessment, descriptive feedback, and effective leadership, is indeed a distraction.
