This morning I read an op-ed by Douglas Holtz-Eakin tackling the chasm between what it takes to enroll in college and how ready for college students actually are. It is a yawning gap, and Holtz-Eakin rightly laments it. But then he pulls the ol’, “Common Core is a high standard,” and suggests that it will bridge the college prep divide. He even writes that the Core has been “shown” to be “effective.”
Not only has there been no meaningful evidence of the Core’s effectiveness, but right after I read Holtz-Eakins’ piece I saw that the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores had come out – indeed, for the very 12th grade students on the verge of college – and they had dropped in both reading and math between 2013 and 2015, and some dropped going back to 2009. This was, of course, as Common Core was being implemented nationwide. And not only did aggregate scores drop, but also scores for numerous racial and ethnic groups.
Do these results prove that Common Core is either impotent, or worse, a negative force? Certainly not. For one thing, as presented we can’t even break the 12th grade scores out by state as we were able to do with the 4th and 8th grade scores released several months ago. And even that was only able to furnish slightly more nuanced evidence than looking at aggregate national scores. But all these scores do undermine any proclamations of proven Core effectiveness.
Of course, lots of things affect test scores – federal policies, state policies, local policies, economics, demographic changes, etc. – and we can’t ignore all those things and just declare whatever policy we happen to dislike the undisputed villain. But one thing is clear, no matter how you feel about Common Core or anything else: NAEP tests continue to produce awful results for the students who are about to finish K‑12 education, whether it is stagnant 17-year-olds’ scores on Long-Term Trend NAEP exams, or these scores for 12th graders on the “Main NAEP.” And this, as I tackle in a new, big update to the Downsizing the Federal Government K‑12 page, despite huge increases in spending over the decades, as well as heavily centralized control.
Do the latest NAEP results prove that the Common Core, or centralization more broadly, are bad for American education? No. But they sure don’t help the narrative that centralization, including the federally driven Core, has helped it.
