Common Core State Standards Initiative
The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) is a voluntary framework established in 2009 aimed at standardizing educational expectations in English and mathematics for students from kindergarten through grade twelve across the United States. Developed by the National Governor's Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the initiative seeks to enhance student preparedness for higher education and the workforce while addressing disparities in educational quality among states. The standards outline specific learning goals and cognitive skills that students should achieve at each grade level, although they do not prescribe teaching methods or curricula, which remain the responsibility of individual schools and districts.
Initially adopted by a majority of states, the Common Core has faced criticism and resistance over the years. Concerns have been raised about federal influence in state education, the perceived lack of public input during the standards' development, and the potential widening of achievement gaps among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Additionally, while some educators initially supported the initiative, subsequent surveys indicated declining approval as implementation challenges became evident. By the early 2020s, many states had begun to revise or abandon the Common Core standards, reflecting the ongoing debate about their efficacy and suitability for diverse educational contexts.
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Common Core State Standards Initiative
The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) is a voluntary set of standards for English and mathematics for kindergarten through grade twelve, developed by the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in 2009 as a means to improve student preparation for higher education and employment and to create common standards for public schools across the United States, thus greatly reducing the existing educational inequality among schools. The CCSSI includes detailed descriptions of the content and cognitive skills that students are expected to master at each level and also includes tests for each grade level to assess if the students have mastered the expected skills and content. However, the Common Core is not a curriculum, and the specific methods of teaching content, including creation of syllabi and lesson plans, are left up to each individual school or school system. While the majority of states and the District of Columbia had initially agreed to implement the Common Core standards, by the early 2020s, several of those states had revised or otherwise moved, to some extent, away from the standards; still others had opted out entirely.
Background
Unlike many industrialized countries, the United States has never had a national curriculum for K–12 education, and most decisions regarding public schools are made at the state and local levels. The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution states that only those powers mentioned in the Constitution are the prerogative of the federal government, and because education is not mentioned, authority for setting educational standards therefore rests with the states. This system allows each state to determine its own priorities and standards, a freedom that is highly prized by many. For decades this system produced good results, and the US public education system was considered among the best in the world.
However, as many other countries improved and expanded their school systems after World War II, concerns began to be raised about the ability of US students to compete on a global scale. International comparisons such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) found US students scoring far lower than students from other industrialized countries, while the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found wide differences in achievement between states and between groups of students based on factors such as race, ethnicity, and income.
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which was passed by Congress in 2001, intended to address some of these problems by requiring states to set standards and report on student achievement, including breakdowns by race and ethnicity, and requiring school systems to show improvement in test scores to continue receiving federal funding. The NCLB program initially enjoyed wide support in its goals for quality education for all children and to close the achievement gap, but after several years it increasingly became the target of criticism. One criticism was that NCLB placed too much emphasis on high-stakes testing, which encouraged teachers and school systems to “teach to the test” and in some cases to cheat (e.g., by changing students’ answers on exams) to reach the prescribed standards. In addition, because each state is allowed to choose or develop its own tests, there was no common standard for what students were expected to master in each grade, and states could easily achieve a high pass rate by making exams easier. While the NCLB was ultimately replaced in late 2015 by the Every Student Succeeds Act, the Common Core had already been developed to address these concerns.
Overview
The twin purposes of the Common Core standards are to create and implement national standards in education for each grade level in kindergarten through grade twelve and to improve and equalize the quality of education throughout the country and be better able to compete on a global scale. Although the Common Core standards have largely been used primarily to organize curricula and evaluations, they are also meant to improve communication between educators, parents, and students by creating clear and consistent expectations of what students are expected to master at each level of their education.
The standards were written by drawing on the best existing state standards while also taking into account international standards so that no state adopting the Common Core standards should feel that they are lowering expectations for their students. In addition, states are allowed to create state-specific standards that may constitute up to 15 percent of the total.
The goal of Common Core is to ensure that all US students will graduate from high school ready to succeed in higher education, a vocational education program, or immediate employment. Although the initiative does not provide learning materials to schools such as textbooks or prepared lesson plans, backers hoped that collaboration among states would occur to develop learning materials with the common standards facilitating that process.
Within the first few years of implementation, the standards came under harsh criticism, with four states (Indiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Arizona) formally unadopting the standards within six years of the initiative's introduction. By the early 2020s, many of the adopting states had altered or replaced the standards to some extent, and four states (Virginia, Texas, Nebraska, and Alaska) had not adopted them at all; Minnesota had adopted just the English standards.
One of the chief criticisms of the Common Core initiative has been that it significantly reduces a state's constitutional right to regulate education and instead places that power in the hands of the federal government by allowing it to impose a federally lead national education standard that many feel may be inappropriate for every school system or school. In addition, despite the Common Core standards being touted as voluntary, the federal government offered incentives to states who adopted them. For instance, in the 2009 Race to the Top competition in which states submitted proposals to improve K–12 education, the scoring process included extra points given to states that agreed to implement high educational standards. Many states agreed to implement Common Core so as to be in a better position to win federal money. In 2013, the federal government offered waivers for NCLB requirements to states that implemented Common Core standards. These examples of incentivizing the Common Core standards by the federal government furthered the belief of many Americans and state leaders that the federal government was orchestrating the implementation of educational standards.
Another criticism of Common Core has been the perceived lack of public debate and input into the development of the standards and the role of corporations in the funding, promoting, and creation of the standards. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, supplied millions of dollars to the initiative, and many questioned whether a conflict of interest existed since Bill Gates's Microsoft Corporation was poised to benefit monetarily from the Common Core's focus on technology education.
Many also remained concerned that the Common Core standards proved more demanding than those already in place in many school systems and that teachers and administrators did not have enough time to prepare for their implementation, resulting in widespread failure among students who previously were judged to be performing adequately. A related concern has been that the standards have widened the gap in education achievement between rich and poor students and between different racial and ethnic groups. Those from more privileged backgrounds that may have access to private tutoring and other programs have been more able to meet the standards, while many students without those advantages have not. According to Allie Bidwell of US News and World Report, a 2013 survey conducted by the education journal Education Next found that 76 percent of teachers polled supported the Common Core initiative, 12 percent opposed it, and 12 percent did not have a strong feeling for or against it. In a survey conducted the next year, however, just 14 percent of teachers supported the initiative, 40 percent opposed it, and 46 percent had no strong feeling for or against the plan.
While debates over the implementation of the standards continued into the late 2010s amid reports that many states had come to favor their own revised or almost entirely different versions, some researchers had attempted to conduct relevant data analysis to provide more objective information about the initiative's impact over time. One study, the findings of which were released in 2019, was commissioned by the federally funded Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning to gauge the effects of college- and career-ready standards on academic achievement. The researchers reported that, based on their assessment of NAEP scores between 1990 and 2017, the standards had small negative effects overall. As limited studies continued to show a lack of drastic positive impacts and generally mixed findings as far as student achievement, opinions and support of the standards also further fluctuated, with many states having moved away from a wholistic application by the early 2020s.
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