The Common Core challenge this year is not for children taking the new academic tests aligned with the Core but for parents and teachers and politicians who must consider what the “re-centered” test scores say about students and education in the United States. Are the adults in our nation up to the task of academic honesty or will they buckle under and blame the Core and its tests should student achievement not meet their preconceptions? Implementing and living with the Common Core really is a test of adult integrity in the United States.
Why is there an onus on adults to understand and honestly respond to the anticipated angst that will rise when student scores on the Core tests are made public? Simply put, the lowered test scores are what honest adults should have expected when education standards and expectations in this country were adjusted to improve the competitive achievement of our children with their international peers. The honest appraisal is that a score of proficient on a traditional academic test in the United States was not equal to a proficient score on an international test. The academic performances of many children will not match the image that uninformed adults have of our school children. What will the adult response be? Will it be Horatio Alger redux – commitment to future success through hard work – or will it be a damning of the new data with an homage to Lake Woebegone?
Let’s examine the world of educational achievement that led to the Common Core State Standards. “For years, the academic progress of our nation’s students has been stagnant, and we have lost ground to our international peers. Particularly in subjects such as math, college remediation rates have been high. One root cause has been an uneven patchwork of academic standards that vary from state to state and do not agree on what students should know and be able to do at each grade level.
Recognizing the value and need for consistent learning goals across states, in 2009 the state school chiefs and governors that comprise CCSSO and the NGA Center coordinated a state-led effort to develop the Common Core State Standards. Designed through collaboration among teachers, school chiefs, administrators, and other experts, the standards provide a clear and consistent framework for educators.” These were the words and actions of the collective governors and state school superintendents of our nation. And, forty-three states concurred by adopting the Core as their new state standards.
http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/
What were the governors and state school superintendents thinking? Actually, they did nothing more than listen to and respond to the roused finger pointing of American business interests and politicians. The United States lost the historic economic advantage it had held over the rest of the world due to the success of public education in this country. Education in the US was universal and focused upon college or the industrial skills of pre-World War Two. Education in the rest of the world was for privileged children only. When European and Asian leaders observed the connection of a rigorous education system to economic growth, they quickly reformed their national school systems and their academic performances climbed above the academic achievements of the United States which languished with a 1950s educational system.
Specifically, what was this data? “Among the 34 OECD countries, the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 and is ranked 27th (this is the best estimate, although the rank could be between 23 and 29 due to sampling and measurement error). Performance in reading and science are both close to the OECD average. The United States ranks 17 in reading, (range of ranks: 14 to 20) and 20 in science (range of ranks: 17 to 25). There has been no significant change in these performances over time.
Just over one-quarter (26%) of 15-year-olds in the United States do not reach the PISA baseline Level 2 of mathematics proficiency, at which level students begin to demonstrate the skills that will enable them to participate effectively and productively in life. This percentage is higher than the OECD average of 23% and has remained unchanged since 2003. By contrast, in Hong Kong-China, Korea, Shanghai-China and Singapore, 10% of students or fewer are poor performers in mathematics.
While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53 000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115 000 per student.
The analysis suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA. The prominence of modeling in U.S. high school standards has already influenced developers of large-scale assessments in the United States. If more students work on more and better modeling tasks than they do today, then one could reasonably expect PISA performance to improve.”
http://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/PISA-2012-results-US.pdf
So, how should the use of Core-aligned tests be viewed by honest adults? Adults need to understand the changes in academic expectations that require a more rigorous test. And, adults need to be honest in understanding that when children are given a more rigorous test, their initial achievement results will not resemble their results on the former, less rigorous tests. Adults accustomed to inflated pre-Core test results will be dismayed with their children’s performances on the new tests. This happens whenever large scale tests are “re-centered”. It is similar to the problem that the College Board faced with the national results on the SAT in 1995.
“The primary problem with the pre-1995 scale is that test scores are still linked to the 1941 and 1942 reference groups of students, and the test-taking population changed significantly in the decades after World War II.”
In the post-World War years, the annual average on the SAT slowly crept higher and higher. This was not the result of changes in educational quality but rather the result of using outdated reference points in determining test scores. The SAT suffered from score inflation or scores that did not clearly represent academic performance. As a result, the College Board re-centered its testing reference points in 1995. This resulted in a new scoring system that was different than the 1995 system.
http://www.erikthered.com/tutor/sat-act-history.html
In 2015 we face another re-centering event. The systems of labeling educational performance will change and scores before 2015 that were in the mid to lower ranges of proficiency will no longer be proficient. The same will be true of scores in the advanced range. Or to say it differently, children who were considered academically proficient or advanced before 2015 may not be academically proficient or advanced in 2015 and beyond.
How do we know this? Two states already have experienced re-centering. “In New York and Kentucky, two states that adopted Common Core tests early, the percentage of students considered proficient in reading and math plummeted. In New York, about two-thirds of students were proficient on both on pre-Common Core tests; after the new tests were introduced, fewer than one-third were considered proficient.
Results in Kentucky were similar. And the same thing is likely to happen nationally. Seventeen states worked together on a new standardized test as part of a coalition called Smarter Balanced. In November, Smarter Balanced predicted that less than half of students will be considered proficient in reading and math this year.
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/1/7477495/common-core-2015
What should we expect when the 2015 scores on Core-aligned tests are released? It is too easy to anticipate the response of those without integrity. They will complain that the fault is in the Core and the tests. The tests are too hard. They are not the tests we want for our children. They do not represent education in our state or community.
However, unless our states and communities have seceded from the United States or the world, the 2015 test scores will clearly represent a more honest appraisal of local, state and national academic performance than the pre-2015 scores. And, the 2015 scores will point to the areas of improvement that will be necessary if the adults of our nation really want their children to be academically competitive internationally.
This also has historic precedents. When the Russians launched their Sputnik in 1957, leaders in the United States were dismayed at how the Soviet Union had beaten this country into space. “American concerns that they had fallen behind the Soviet Union in the race to space led quickly to a push by legislators and educators for greater emphasis on mathematics and the physical sciences in American schools. The United States’ National Defense Education Act of 1958 increased funding for these goals from childhood education through the post-graduate level.
U.S. citizens feared that schools in the USSR were superior to American schools, and Congress reacted by adding the act to take US schools up to speed.
In 1940 about one-half million Americans attended college, which was about 15 percent of their age group. By 1960, however, college enrollments had expanded to 3.6 million. By 1970, 7.5 million students were attending colleges in the U.S., or 40 percent of college-age youths.”
http://www.ask.com/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act?qsrc=3044
Historically, education systems in the United States have responded to national challenges with improved results. One response to the challenges posed when we again re-center education in the United States is to understand the dynamics of change and allow schools, teachers and students to successfully adjust to new academic standards and tests. This is the Horatio Alger tradition, a story of success that the people of the United States have lived over and over again.
Of course, there is another recourse. We can ignore the disconnection between what adults want from their schools and what they are willing to do to achieve what they want. We can warm ourselves with the words we love to say and hear. Thank you, Mr. Keillor, and I paraphrase:
“That’s the way it is in these United States where all women are strong, all men are good looking and all children are above average.”