The National Pulse: “A Little Troubling”: Study by Pro-Common Core Group Finds Standards Have Failed

This study by a pro-Common Core group as summarized by Dr. Effrem confirms what many experts and parents have known all along – that the Common Core standards were going to fail academically. Here is an excerpt:

Yet another study confirms what a miserable academic failure the Common Core standards have turned out to be. The research was carried out by the federally funded Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL) and reported by Lance Izumi of Pacific Research Institute in the conservative Daily Caller, as well as by Chalkbeat, a very pro-Common Core establishment outlet.

The key findings of this study are as follows:

Contrary to our expectation, we found that the CCR [College and Career Ready, i.e. Common Core] standards had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards, and had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of NAEP composite scores. The size of these negative effects, however, was generally small, ranging from -0.10 to -0.06 SDs.

Although the authors say that the negative effects were “generally small,” one of the authors admits in the Chalkbeat piece:

“It’s rather unexpected,” said researcher Mengli Song of the American Institutes for Research. “The magnitude of the negative effects tend to increase over time. That’s a little troubling.”

As Izumi states, “it is more than a little troubling.” Here are several reasons why:

• C-SAIL, the federally funded research entity that supervised the research, is headed by Morgan Polikoff, who is very much in favor of Common Core and student data mining. If research put out by these people and entities is finding that Common Core is harmful, then the outlined problems are quite likely to be real.
• The actual researchers are from the American Institutes for Research (AIR) which bills itself as “one of the world’s largest behavioral and social science research and evaluation organizations,” and they are also strong supporters of Common Core and Social emotional learning (SEL) teaching, testing, and data collection. According to AIR’s contract with the state of Florida, they not only write state level Common Core assessments, but also the NAEP and the validation studies for the NAEP, the scores for which were examined for this study. If AIR researchers, with their vested interest in showing that Common Core and their state tests improve the NAEP scores (which they also write and which could easily be manipulated by them), found that Common Core in fact damages academic achievement measured by the very tests they write, then those findings must truly be very significant and “troubling.”
• Tom Loveless of the center-left Brookings Institution (and long a critic of the Common Core standards as a means of improving academic achievement) said when asked about this study, “One thing standards advocates need to think about is that this doesn’t appear to work very well.”
• Other pro-Common Core researchers and advocates admit that the methodology of this study is sound.
• Chalkbeat is already discussing a study not even released yet that has NAEP results only through 2013 that allegedly shows improvements with Common Core in a attempt to blunt the seriously bad news for Core supporters from the C-SAIL/AIR study.

You may read the entire article at The National Pulse.