Common Core Has A Central Problem

There is no evidence that raising standards produces better academic outcomes. What does work? Having a good teacher.

Russ Whitehurst has a question for the Obama administration and other proponents of the Common Core education reforms: Where is your evidence that national standards in reading and math will produce better academic outcomes?

Mr. Whitehurst, an education scholar at the Brookings Institution, has been asking this question for some time. "The lack of evidence that better content standards enhance student achievement is remarkable given the level of investment in this policy and high hopes attached to it," he wrote in 2009. "There is a rational argument to be made for good standards being a precondition for other desirable reforms, but it is currently just that—an argument."

When I called Mr. Whitehurst last week to ask if the case for Common Core had gotten any stronger in six years, he chuckled. "The evidence is really quite strong that there is no correlation between the quality of standards that have been implemented in the past and student achievement," he said. "You've got states like Massachusetts with high-quality standards and high achievement and states like California with high-quality standards and low achievement. The correlation is zero."

In 2012 another Brookings scholar, Tom Loveless, compared state standards and standardized-test scores across the country and reached a similar conclusion. "The finding is clear," he wrote in Education Week. "The quality of standards has not mattered. From 2003 to 2009, states with terrific standards raised their National Assessment of Education Progress scores by roughly the same margin as states with awful ones."

The federal government is prohibited by law from endorsing or sanctioning curricula. Still, 44 states and the District of Columbia have signed on to Common Core. What the Obama administration lacked in hard data to back its scheme was made up for with hard cash. States were offered millions of dollars through federal grants to implement the initiative. Never mind that even federal studies have concluded that merely setting higher standards doesn't lift student performance. At least three reports from the Education Department, including a 2008 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, have found no relationship between the difficulty of a state's test and the level or change in student achievement.

Backers of the Common Core argue that it will improve U.S. performance on international tests. And while it is true that students in countries with national standards, such as South Korea and Japan, regularly do better than American students, so do many in countries without national standards, such as Canada. It is also true that a U.S. without national standards has outperformed plenty of countries that have them.

Mr. Whitehurst argues that policy makers would do better to focus on teacher quality and other reforms with a track record of improving student outcomes. "We know that teacher effectiveness is one thing that can make a huge difference," he said. "The data for that is overwhelmingly strong." The difference between a child getting one of the best elementary-school teachers and one of the worst is a half-year of learning.

This piece originally appeared in Wall Street Journal

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal