At least the birds will be happy.

At least the birds will be happy.

One thing that becomes clear in the battle over the implementation of Common Core reading and math standards is the lengths to which opponents of them will go to engage in mythmaking and less-than-honest statements against the effort. Instead of engaging in serious arguments about either the quality of Common Core’s standards or even the  Common Core foes (especially movement conservatives generally uninterested in education issues) have engaged in every kind of dishonest rhetoric — from spinning conspiracy-theorizing over the role of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in supporting the implementation of the standards in 45 states and the District of Columbia, to declaring that the standards don’t match up well to those set by international assessments such as TIMSS and PISA — in their opposition. Yet as Dropout Nation has pointed out in its collection of pieces on the importance of Common Core, these statements made by foes of the standards aren’t even close to being worthy of serious consideration. While there are certainly compelling arguments than can be made against how Common Core has been implemented (as well as honest questions about how Common Core supporters have dealt with the challenges of making the standards a reality), Common Core foes have decided that it’s a little too hard to actually engage in such substantive discussions.

statelogoSo it isn’t shocking that three of the leading foes against Common Core, including Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas (whose arguments against the standards were shredded by Dropout Nation last month), Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute, and the otherwise-sensible Williamson Evers of Stanford University, took to the pages of New York City’s Daily News to perpetuate their myths. And as usual, the rehashed rhetoric doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Essentially arguing that states implementing Common Core merely did so in order to attain federal funding through the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top competitive grant competition, Stotsky, McCluskey and Evers proclaim that the standards were crafted by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers “behind closed doors’ and approved by states without “open debate and citizen control”. Citing the claims of their favorite experts opposed to Common Core (other than Stotsky herself), Stanford University’s R. James Milgram, that its math standards would “put kids two years behind their top-scoring international peers”, the threesome also recite the now-familiar refrain that Common Core “isn’t internationally benchmarked”. Why? Declares Stotsky, McCluskey, and Evers: “[Because supporters] cannot name a country to which it pegged”. Declaring that “there is little evidence” that curricula standards lead to “superior outcomes” in student achievement, Stotsky, McCluskey, and Evers then proclaim that Common Core will “cripple individual choice”. There’s also the claptrap about Common Core keeping states being individual laboratories for reform. But that play on the idea of states as laboratories of democracy (another theme of Common Core foes falls apart once one considers the history of American public education.

Your editor can only thank Stotsky, McCluskey, and Evers for making it so easy to tear down their latest claptrap. The fact that Common Core’s standards have been thoroughly discussed and debated since 2009, when NGA and CCSSO announced the effort (as well as the fact that the entire effort has been well-covered in the media) puts lie to their claims that the standards were somehow written behind closed doors. [This fact also tosses water on the argument that states only implemented Common Core in order to get their hands on Race to the Top dollars.] Considering that common curricula standards across all states has been one that has been advanced since 2004, when Achieve Inc. began working with states such as Indiana on the American Diploma Project (and has been discussed since the 1980s thanks to the work of standards-and-accountability camp within the school reform movement), Stotsky, McCluskey, and Evers are engaging in ahistorical dishonesty.  Meanwhile the fact that NGA and CCSSO are organizations that represent the nation’s governors (all of whom are elected by citizens in their respective states) and state superintendents (who are either elected, appointed by governors, or chosen by appointed and elected state boards of education) also proves lie to their claim that Common Core was crafted without “citizen control”.

Certainly one can debate whether state legislatures should be involved in developing and implementing standards. One can even argue over whether states that implemented Common Core should have held more public hearings — and sought out more input from families and other citizens — to discuss the standards. But legislators, in general, delegate the nuts-and-bolts of policymaking to executive branch officials because the latter are in the best position to actually engage the questions of implementation. As for the latter question: One must remember that implicit in the concept of democratic republicanism is that citizens trust that elected officials will who will have the competence to make sensible decisions as well as be as transparent as possible; citizens who either disagree with the decisions or demand greater levels of transparency have plenty of avenues of recourse (including convincing legislators to roll back decisions and voting out politicians with who they disagree), all of which have been availed by Common Core foes with varying degrees of success.

Meanwhile the argument that Common Core isn’t benchmarked to international standards — an argument Stotsky made last month — is also pure garbage. As Dropout Nation noted last month in tearing apart Stotsky’s argument, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s review of Common Core (which took place before the think tank itself began doing work on the standards funded by the Gates Foundation), found that the standards matched up well to the standards underlying both PISA and TIMSS; in fact, Common Core’s math standards were rated a B, just a rating below that of TIMSS and higher than that of PISA itself. Others who have evaluated Common Core, including a team led by University of Oregon professor David Conley (who served with Stotsky on the committee that validated the standards), have reached similar conclusions, and this stands no matter how much attacks on their integrity Stotsky, in particular, wants to mount. This isn’t surprising. Benchmarking Common Core to international curricula standards has been as much at the heart of the development of the standards; Achieve, whose American Diploma Project is the immediate predecessor of sorts for Common Core, got the ball rolling in 2008 with Benchmarking for Success, a report which laid out much of the framework for how Common Core’s standards would be crafted as well as offered guidance to states in revamping standards on their own.

This isn’t to say that Common Core’ is perfect, or that everyone is favor of the standards. Mathematicians and math teachers have spent the past four years debating whether Common Core’s math standards force kids to engage in abstract concepts too quickly, and whether its call to introduce Algebra 1 to kids during freshmen year of high school (instead of during middle school as Dropout Nation and others such as Evers support) makes sense. But the disagreement over Common Core’s math standards have far less to do with the quality of the standards than with the viciousness of (and resulting lack of consensus resulting from) the math wars that have been raging both within American public education and the nation’s higher education circles for the past four decades (including the nasty effort waged by Milgram, the favored math expert of Common Core foes, to convince Stanford to deny tenure to longtime colleague Jo Boaler). But such disagreement neither takes away from either the evidence that Common Core meets international standards, or that the focus of the standards on making sense of abstractions and text difficulty in reading comprehension (the latter of which has been championed  by reading gurus such as Tim Shanahan) makes sense.

As for the argument by Stotsky, McCluskey, and Evers that standards don’t “yield superior outcomes”? This isn’t exactly even close to reality. As Peter Cookson Jr. and Constance Clark of Education Sector noted in their study last year, states that improved their math standards reduced the number of students scoring “below basic” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress by 26 percentage points between 2003 and 2011. In fact, thanks to the efforts of states to improve their reading standards (along with other reforms spurred by the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, 217,432 fewer fourth-graders were functionally illiterate in 2011 than eight years earlier. This isn’t to say that high-quality standards are the only solution to addressing the nation’s education crisis, or even that high-quality standards on their own will be effective without successful implementation; this is a lesson reformers have learned all too well after two decades of states developing and implementing their own standards. But to argue that standards, along with other reforms, don’t lead to improvements in student achievement (which is what one would call a superior outcome) is just pure sophistry.

The argument that standards, especially those developed nationally, don’t lead to improvements in student achievement fails on its face once you take a look at other forms of national standards, both in the United States as well as in the rest of the world. There are the underlying standards for Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate, the two main programs for providing kids with college-preparatory learning; in fact, the efficacy of AP in helping poor and minority kids gain the knowledge needed for higher ed success, along with the fact that Zip Code Education policies keep so many of them from being provided those courses, is one reason why states are implementing Common Core in the first place. There’s also the academic performance of the top seven nations in math, including Singapore, all of which have national reading and math curricula standards (and in some cases, common curricula as well). Enough said.

Stotsky, who touts the success of the now-defunct standards developed by Massachusetts during her tenure at the Bay State’s education department (as well as the supposed inferiority of Common Core to them) as a reason for her opposition, surely knows better. Same is true for Evers, who has spent decades as a leading light in the standards-and-accountability arm of the school reform movement. This statement is more-reflective of the view of McCluskey, who, along with the rest of Cato’s education policy team, have long-touted the idea that the one best solution for the nation’s education crisis is to expand school choice, specifically through voucher-like tax credits (which he thinks is a more-preferable approach to vouchers and charter schools). This silver bullet thinking is, unfortunately, a problem within the school reform movement itself. But as I always say, there is no one solution that can address the complexity of the problems that plague American public education. Merely expanding school choice alone won’t work if families don’t have comprehensive-yet-simple data on the quality of the schools their kids may attend. More importantly, choice won’t work if families aren’t confident that the schools from which they choose will provide their children with the college-preparatory curricula they need in order to take on the challenges that await them. Quality of choice matters as much as having options in the first place.

This is where implementing a common set of comprehensive high-quality curricula standards comes into play. Common Core can actually help expand the array of high-quality choices for families, especially the four out of every five families who don’t have the wide array of educational opportunities they deserve. As in the private sector, high-quality standards allow for families to choose schools fit for their kids in ways other than academics by providing them with the confidence that their kids will be provided with knowledge they need and deserve. This is especially important to the families from poor and minority backgrounds who are often stuck sending their kids to dropout factories and failure mills. High-quality standards also expand choice by allowing for more innovation in curricula development. This is because there are now commonly agreed-upon content areas around which a variety of curriculum developers can rally. In the case of Common Core, the standards have actually opened up opportunities for families as well as communities of minorities historically disdained by American public education to spur the development of their own curricula. For American Indian tribes for example, Common Core even allows them to incorporate their own languages and cultures into the curricula their children are provided, as well as ensure that the history of their roles in this country are as much a part of what their kids learn as the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock.

It would be nice if Stotsky, McCluskey, and Evers engaged in some serious and substantive arguments. That’s not likely to ever happen. But at least they have given Common Core supporters more paper with which to line bird cages.