Editor’s Note: For an alternative viewpoint, please see: Point: The Collapse of Common Core
The irony of the controversy over the Common Core is that proponents and opponents actually agree on much more than we disagree on. We all agree that America needs to better prepare all its students to thrive in today’s competitive global economy. And that’s the principle at the heart of the Common Core. As a parent and a policy leader, I want every American child held to the same high expectations as students in the highest-performing nations.
The Common Core arose out of a longstanding recognition that we weren’t preparing all students to compete in the 21st century. In 1983, President Reagan’s “A Nation at Risk” report sounded an alarm on America’s public education system, which was falling well short of where it needed to be and varied widely from state to state. The report urged public schools to “adopt more rigorous and measurable standards, and higher expectations, for academic performance” and called for a “high level of shared education.”
Remediation rates and achievement gaps were large. Achievement was low. More than 40 percent of first-year college students required remediation in math and/or language arts. Three decades later, only about one-third of students are proficient in math and reading, and there remains a 30 percentage point gap between black Hispanic students and their white counterparts.
Math was and is a particular weakness and an important skill. When the first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) math results were released in 2003, the United States performed statistically significantly below the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average. Even our top performers in math constituted a much smaller fraction of students than in other OECD countries. Today, the same is true. This, despite employers reporting that math skills would be critical in 70 percent of jobs.
Before the Common Core, each state designed its own standards, resulting in 50 different definitions of academic success. What the education nonprofit Education Trust called the “haphazard patchwork of state standards” led to situations where two states with relatively similar proficiency scores according to their state assessments had wildly divergent results on a national assessment. Students learned the hard way after showing up at college and finding themselves unable to enroll in college courses because they weren’t prepared.
To their credit, states themselves decided that the old model wasn’t working and banded together to create the Common Core. The new standards made it possible to compare results from one state to the next and enabled parents, teachers and school system leaders to know whether their students were really on track to graduate ready for college or a career for the first time in history.
The Common Core also established higher and deeper math expectations in order to give our dismal performance in this key subject a boost. For years, conceptual math had been the standard in elite private school models like Montessori and Reggio Emilia, as well as high-performing Asian nations like South Korea and Singapore. But the United States had continued to teach students tricks and rote processes, which enabled them to find the solution but not to always understand why the answer was correct.
Today, schools are still in transition. Teachers are still internalizing the standards; states and districts are still learning how best to support teachers and students. Implementation has been far from perfect. Early evidence show that when teachers are involved in the transition, they are better able to support students to attain the ambitious standards. But the bottom line is that the Common Core addressed a vital and longstanding need to better prepare all students to graduate from high school ready for college and careers.
Ensuring all students have a fair shot in life begins with providing a world-class education no matter their background or station in life. This starts with setting higher expectations for all of our students.
