One cannot say that the move this week by Florida Gov. Rick Scott to pull the state out of the Common Core-aligned tests developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers testing consortium was a shock. After all, last month’s forced resignation of Common Core champion Tony Bennett as the Sunshine State’s education commissioner — as much driven by opponents of the standards as by the allegations of corruption over his move as Indiana’s superintendent to revise that state’s A-to-F grading systems — opened the door for Common Core foes both within and outside the state to put additional pressure on Scott to both ditch the tests and the standards altogether. Add in Scott’s general ineffectiveness as a leader on systemic reform efforts (and everything else), his past willingness to abandon doing the right thing for children and families in order to sustain his political ambitions, and his concerns about winning re-election amid his low opinion poll numbers, and it is little surprise that the governor cowardly moved to ditch the PARCC tests. [It also explains why Scott used anti-Common Core talking points in justifying is move to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a letter released this week.]
As Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal and Supt. John Barge vainly hoped in their move this past July to ditch the PARRC tests, Scott likely hopes that this step will mollify Common Core foes among movement conservatives in the Republican Party ranks, who are pressing the state legislature to pass a proposal to ditch Common Core altogether. More importantly, Scott likely hopes that it keeps movement conservatives from attempting to challenge him in a gubernatorial primary next year. But as Deal and Barge found out the hard way, Common Core foes are looking for a substantial victory, and not just a moratoriums on implementing standards as has happened in Indiana and Michigan. Like Deal, Scott will eventually end up conducting a “review” of Common Core — and it will be done in spite of efforts by predecessor Jeb Bush and others to keep the standards in place. And given Scott’s cowardice on other school reform issues, expect the governor to either hand down another executive order ditching Common Core altogether or sign a bill from the legislature that does the same thing.
Even if Scott manages to muster enough spine to keep Common Core in place, supporters of the standards should be worried about the state’s decision to abandon PARCC and develop its own exams. As with the moves by Georgia and Alabama to ditch Common Core-aligned tests, Florida’s decision makes it harder for them to advance their dearly-held idea of common curricula standards without the common accountability systems that came into place in the last decade as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act and its Adequate Yearly Progress provisions. This fact, along with a report released this month validating the benefits of accountability (especially AYP) on student achievement, should push Common Core supporters (including conservative reformers such as Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who has sensibly touted the standards while senselessly pushing to evisceration of No Child’s provisions) to once again fully embrace common accountability alongside high-quality common standards.
An underlying idea behind the tests developed by PARCC (which is geared toward providing tests to 18 of the 45 states and the District of Columbia implementing Common Core) along with the Smarter Balanced coalition of states, is that multi-state testing regimes could advance transparency and accountability. This would happen by effectively wrestling the setting of test proficiency targets (or cut scores) out of the purview of state boards of education, which often set the goals so low that they made a mockery of the curricula standards aligned to them, weakened the potential of the standards in providing comprehensive college-preparatory curricula to all children, and promoted the illusion that everything was fine in traditional districts (especially those in suburbia). With high-quality data in hand, reformers and policymakers could shine light on which states were setting demanding proficiency targets, and ultimately, show the progress of districts and the adults who worked with them in improving student achievement. They could then use the data to hold districts and the adults within them accountable in their own ways, including through sanctions and rewards states develop on their own. This idea of transparency as accountability is at the heart of the âreform realismâ touted by Fordham and other conservative reformers, and it is also at the heart of the Obama Administrationâs No Child waiver gambit, which has allowed 41 states and the District of Columbia to ditch the lawâs Adequate Yearly Progress provisions for their own array of accountability systems.
But transparency-as-accountability in the form of Common Core-aligned tests has only a chance of working only if all the states implementing the standards use them. With Florida, Georgia, and Alabama already abandoning both tests â and more states, including Indiana, likely to do so within the next two years â this isnât going to happen. Because these states are either developing their own tests or using those from ACT, they are also likely to continue setting low proficiency cut score targets, especially since state education officials are always under more pressure from traditionalists to define proficiency down than from reformers to do the converse. This will lead to inaccurate data on district and school performance that will be useless in any accountability regime. Even if all the states implementing Common Core stuck to using the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests, transparency-as-accountability will likely fail because shining light on the failures (and successes) of districts and other school operators is only as useful as the carrots and sticks accompanying it. Embarrassment on its own has yet to force failing districts such as Detroit Public Schools and Indianapolis Public Schools to shape up. And under the scenario of all states using the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests, embarrassment alone also won’t force states to stop setting proficiency cut scores at abysmally low (and inaccurate) levels.
Certainly transparency has value in advancing accountability and systemic reform. After all, No Child’s AYP provisions helped shed light on how poorly districts were serving poor and minority children, as well as exposed how states used inaccurate graduation rate calculations to effectively hide the high levels of high school dropouts that are the most-visible examples of the nation’s education crisis. But transparency is rather meaningless unless all states have strong common accountability systems aligned to curricula standards that uses that transparency (and, more importantly, the high-quality data promoting it) to subject districts and states to harsh consequences as well as meaningful rewards. More importantly, as Sandy Kress, the mastermind behind No Child made clear in last week’s Conversation at Dropout Nation Podcast, standards are merely empty promises unless both transparency and accountability are in place.
Providing both accountability and transparency, or identifying failing schools and then subjecting them to consequences, is why No Child, imperfect as it may be, has been successful in advancing an array of reforms — including the steps that led to the development of Common Core — that are helping more children get the high-quality education they need and deserve. This fact was made clear earlier this year in a report released earlier this year by the American Enterprise Institute on the impact of No Child’s accountability provisions in improving student achievement in North Carolina. [In an act of intellectual dishonesty, AEI and its education czar, Rick Hess, chose to ignore the underlying data and still argue for eviscerating No Child altogether.] Now a working paper released this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research on the impact of the accountability efforts put in place by Texas (and effectively undercut this year by the state’s passage of House Bill 5, which strips away the tests at the heart of the accountability system) further proves the value of common accountability in helping children succeed.
In the report, a team led by Harvard University Assistant Professor David J. Deming concluded that the Lone Star State’s accountability system forced schools determined as being low-performing to take steps that improved student achievement, especially for poor and minority kids struggling in school. In fact, a ninth-grader who had previously failed one of the state’s eighth-grade exams was 14 percent more-likely to attend a four-year college and 12 percent more-likely to attain a baccalaureate than those attending schools in schools that have already been found to be “Recognized” or meeting minimum standards for improving student achievement; high-performing students in schools determined to be low-performing also had improved prospects of college attendance and completion. The benefits extended beyond high school and higher education. Ninth graders in schools identified as low-performing — and thus, the beneficiary of interventions and sanctions put in place as part of the accountability system — improved their earnings by at least one percent a year by the time they reached age 23; for struggling kids, the increases were around 1.4 percent a year by age 25, a statistically significant improvement over time. When failing schools are targeted for improvement by accountability systems, the benefits are borne for all children, especially kids from low-income households as well as black and minority backgrounds who have been subjected to the worst American public education offers.
These facts alone, along with other data showing the value of No Child, should have long ago convinced Common Core supporters to support both common standards and common accountability. In fact, No Childâs AYP provisions could have served as the model upon which such a system could have been developed, with the Obama Administration issuing legally permissible waivers that would have aligned Common Core with AYP. This, in turn, would have made it less likely that Florida would have dropped the PARCC tests. But because of the logically incoherent policymaking of the Obama Administration though its waiver gambit, there are now 41 different accountability systems, many of which limit the effectiveness of data from Common Core-aligned tests in providing transparency or triggering accountability. Even if Florida, along with Georgia and Alabama, stuck with the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests, the array of super-subgroup subterfuges, Plessy v. Ferguson-like proficiency targets, and moves that reduce accountability to only the worst-performing 10 percent-to-15 percent of schools (while leaving out mediocre suburban districts that are increasing home to more minority children) that have come as a result of the waiver gambit has weakened both transparency and accountability.
The waiver gambit, along with the signals from congressional Republicans such as House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline and Sen. Lamar Alexander that they will also move to eviscerate No Child’s accountability measures, has signaled to states that the federal government (and, in turn, both centrist Democrats and conservative reformers who support both Common Core as well as the efforts of both Obama Administration and the Kline-Alexander axis to neuter accountability) are not serious either about accountability or standards. This is why Scott could proudly proclaim that his move to ditch the PARCC tests was a stand against supposedly excessive federal intrusion while concealing that it was another step by Florida to step away from its promise to provide all kids with high-quality education. And it is also why California Gov. Jerry Brown could be so bold as to declare that he would gut accountability by signing Assembly Bill 484, which eviscerates the exams that help hold districts accountable. And in the process, the very promise of Common Core is merely being made nothing more than just a bunch of aspirations without any meaning for our children.
The move by Gov. Scott to pull Florida from using the PARCC tests should awaken Common Core supporters to the folly of their intellectually dishonest thinking of transparency alone as a substitute for real accountability. And it starts by ending the kind of shoddy policymaking that makes a mockery of the high-quality standards they correctly support.
