We’ve been fighting over the Common Core national curriculum standards for years now, and at this point the people who “fact check” ought to know the facts. Also, at this point, I should be doing many other things than laying out basic truths about the Core. Yet here I am, about to fact-check fact-checking by The Seventy Four, an education news and analysis site set up by former television journalist Campbell Brown. Thankfully, I am not alone in having to repeat this Sisyphean chore; AEI’s Rick Hess did the same thing addressing Washington Post fact-checkers yesterday.
Because I have done this so many times before – what follows are relatively quick, clarifications beneath the “facts” the “fact check” missed.
FACT: It was the states — more specifically the Council of Chief State School Officers and National Governors Association — that developed the standards. During the Obama administration, the Education Department has played no specific role in the implementation of those standards, and the classroom curriculum used to meet the broad goals set out in Common Core is created by districts and states, as it always has been. Further, states have made tweaks to the Common Core standards since their initial adoption and, in some cases, have decided to drop the standards entirely.
- The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and National Governors Association (NGA) are not states. They are, essentially, professional associations of governors and state superintendents. And they are definitely not legislatures, which much more than governors represent “the people” of their states. So no, it was not “states” that developed the standards.
- The CCSSO and NGA explicitly called for federal influence to move states onto common, internationally benchmarked standards – what the Core is supposed to be – writing in the 2008 report Benchmarking for Success that the role of the federal government is to offer “incentives” to get states to use common standards, including offering funding and regulatory relief. See page 7 of the report, and note that the same information was once on the Common Core website but has since been removed.
- The Common Core was dropped into a federally dictated system under the No Child Left Behind Act that required accountability based on state standards and tests, so Washington did have a role in overseeing “implementation” of the standards. And since what is tested for accountability purposes is what is supposed to get taught, it is very deceptive to say, simply, curriculum “is created by districts and states.” The curricula states create is supposed to be heavily influenced by Core, and especially the math section pushes specific content. Indeed, the Core calls specifically for instructional “shifts.” Oh, and the federal government selected and funded two consortia of states to create national tests – the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) and the Smarter-Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) – which the Department of Education, to at least some extent, oversaw.