While critics say it failed to boost student achievement — average fourth-grade math scores have dropped three points and eighth grade by nine since 2009, according to — its champions say it alone can’t improve test performance. Teacher preparedness and learning materials play a far greater role, they argue.

And they credit the Common Core for achieving something that had never been done before: building an on-ramp to algebra from arithmetic. 

Dave Kung, executive director at , a professional organization that works in the higher education space, said this transition was critical, and a major departure from how the subject was taught in earlier decades. 

“The system I went through was largely arithmetic in elementary school and all of a sudden, bam, you hit algebra and suddenly it’s pretty theoretical and pretty abstract,” he said. “The ramp I’m describing is from the concrete nature of arithmetic to the more abstract world of algebra. The Common Core refocused people’s attention on student thinking and that’s an important thing.”

The Common Core was rolled out in 2010 to address the unevenness with which the subject was taught throughout the nation and deepen students’ understanding of this complex topic, often providing children with more than one way to solve a problem. 

Many at the new approach and parents, flummoxed by not being able to help their kids with a subject they’d learned so differently, begrudgingly .  

It took years in many cases for schools to create or adopt the to support the standards. Meanwhile, political foes labeled the standards and school communities buckled under the constant testing pressure with many students of related exams. 

Despite these challenges, math experts say dozens of states still use the standards, some by their original name and others under new monikers. The Common Core has, in many cases, survived even as states across the country revamp their standards to combat poor student performance and wrestle with how to make math and STEM pathways more inclusive. 

While and Florida are among those that dropped the standards — Sunshine State leaders were gleeful about abandoning what they called — others have kept them while making some modifications. 

Louisiana is one such location, changing in 2016. Fourth graders saw their NAEP scores jump between 2022 and 2024 while eighth graders moved a single point. State schools chief Cade Brumley credited the state’s back-to-basics approach for students’ success. 

In Wisconsin, the Common Core remains largely intact, surviving three U.S. presidents and all of the politicization of education that has come with each new term. 

Mary Mooney, a mathematics education consultant with the state, was serving Milwaukee Public Schools when the standards first arrived in 2010. She said her district was uniquely receptive thanks in part to its strong focus on professional learning.  

“At the district level, we were incredibly excited for the Common Core,” Mooney said. “It was finally going to tell us what mathematics is. We thought it was a collection of skills that helps you get an answer. But the Common Core did an amazing job of building better narratives about what mathematics really is and why it is important to every student.” 

She said it helped teachers make connections they hadn’t before. 

“Everybody was challenged with these standards to think differently about mathematics,” she said, adding some teachers, for example, didn’t realize multiplication was so closely tied to elements of geometry. “That was the power of the Common Core. But you really needed good professional learning to see the beauty and power in those standards.”

And while some lament the Common Core for its perceived lack of impact on test scores, Kung said he isn’t too concerned about the standards’ relationship to students’ grades. 

He said the National Assessment of Educational Progress and state tests often reflect “straightforward procedural stuff,” adding, “if a student lost a little bit of that, I’m kind of OK with that if what they gained is a better understanding of what is going on.”

As a historical analogy, he noted that at some point students lost their ability to use . And nobody bemoans that, he said, adding there are some elements of mathematics — what he calls “the drill-and-kill stuff” — for which there are no remaining proponents. 

When Wisconsin was given a chance to jettison the standards during a review process a few years ago, Mooney said, the state opted to keep them, driven by their success and the effort it took to learn and adopt them. And the Common Core made educators rethink the notion of math fluency, which often equated to speed. 

There are far better goals, she said.

“When you think about being fast, you tend to have memorization as the only strategy for understanding your facts,” she said. “We added ‘flexible’ and ‘efficient,’ which helped teachers … to teach the math behind the facts and not simply getting an answer.”

Arlene Crum, director of math for Washington state until last year, said state law requires the education department to periodically revise its learning standards. The review began when Crum still worked for the state, she said, adding she urged officials to stay true to the Common Core for three critical reasons. 

First, she said, the standards were sound. And districts had been working for the last 10 years to make sure their instructional materials were aligned to it at her office’s request, she said. 

“So, I felt it would be a huge task for districts to have the rug suddenly pulled out from them,” Crum said. “And because it’s a national set of standards, there are a ton of resources to help teachers with it.”

Josh Recio of the in Austin said the Common Core works best in the younger years and in getting students ready for the challenges of algebra, a gateway course to higher-level math in high school and college. 

“Most people realize the K-8th grade Common Core standards do a really nice job of preparing students for algebra in high school,” he said. “There is something to be said for having guidance, for having people who are very smart and understand these issues that students face and took the time to write down a set of standards to prepare students for high school. There is a progression of learning that makes sure you are successful once you get there.”

The Gates Foundation provides financial support to Charles A. Dana Center and to �鶹��Ʒ.

The Pittsburgh-based company is one of many — including , , , and — that provide instruction for children and adults. But the language phenom hopes its broader popularity will help it gain traction in a complex space.

“Duolingo certainly arrives late to the party, but their brand recognition, UX design expertise and enormous user base give them a unique advantage,” said Paul Darvasi, CEO and co-founder of , a Montreal-based company with more than 15 years of experience creating learning games. “Personally, I feel math is often taught out of context. Students learn formulas and procedures, but as they get older they rarely know how they will be applied. I believe games and simulations will be able to better connect math to the real world.”

Duolingo, the language learning app in the world, won’t disclose the exact number of users for its math offering, launched in August 2022, but company spokeswoman Monica Earle said it’s in the millions. She said, too, the application’s creators hope it will help alleviate math anxiety, a common phenomenon among children and adults. 

Duolingo’s current math offerings span third grade through early middle school. Samantha Siegel, a company software engineer who spearheaded the math course’s development, said it started with third graders because of the critical lessons taught at that level.

“If you don’t understand how fractions work, it can predict your math performance and proficiency for the rest of your education career,” Siegel said.

She said the company uses real-world problems to further students’ comprehension of what might otherwise seem like abstract concepts.

“We do a lot with implicit learning … you learn by doing,” she said. “We have developed a really proven and unique way of approaching education and packaging it in a really fun way. Why shouldn’t we be the one to apply this to other subjects?”

American students have struggled with mathematics for decades. The Common Core, a controversial set of academic standards rolled out in 2010, was meant to correct the unevenness in how the subject was taught across the nation and deepen students’ understanding. It was met with sharp disdain from teachers, parents and students. 

Despite the derision, it became a symbol of academic rigor and continue to use Common Core math. But even with the new standards, American students continued to flail: Test scores persistently lagged for most, though have emerged in recent months.

A 2024 Urban Institute only reinforced the subject’s importance. It found that increasing math scores helps deliver stronger long-term returns for students — especially related to earnings — compared to reading. 

What’s less obvious, at least to some, is the value of game-based approaches to learning this challenging subject. Critics worry about what they say is Duolingo’s skin-deep approach. 

Keith Devlin, a mathematician and Stanford University professor emeritus, knows repetitive practice is valuable in learning almost anything and that video games and interactive software in general are excellent at keeping people engaged. He’s not as confident, however, in the idea that these applications will create mathematical thinkers.

“The real question is, do games produce better ability to solve a mathematical problem that is more than a basic skill? For the majority of games, the answer is no,” he said. “They often do result in students having a more positive attitude to math — and that’s a plus.”

But they don’t teach users how to solve math problems that require a train of thought, he said. 

“Where they can fall short is in the tendency to focus too heavily on rote practice or gamified repetition without enough conceptual depth,” Gold Bug Interactive’s Darvasi said. “Math understanding requires more than speed and accuracy; it needs problem-solving, reasoning and connections to real-world contexts. Apps that fail to integrate those richer experiences risk reinforcing procedural knowledge without deep comprehension.”

Darvasi said, too, that digital math learning can become isolating if it isn’t paired with collaborative, discussion-based problem-solving — like the kind found in traditional classrooms.

“However, these are temporary setbacks,” he said in assessing current online offerings from multiple companies. “With the latest tools in adaptive learning, thoughtful game design, and technology that can generate fresh challenges on the fly, the path is opening for math to be taught in ways that are engaging, meaningful, and tailored to the learner.”

Duolingo Math’s target audience, spokeswoman Earle said, is students who struggle with the subject and those who enjoy it enough to do it for fun. Cartoon figures and colorful graphics help guide users through the math problems, offering encouragement along the way. 

Roughly 90% of users access Duolingo, which also runs programs off its website, for free. Others pay either $12.99 a month or $95.99 a year for Super Duolingo, which avoids ads and allows for unlimited practice. A second level, Duolingo Max, costs $29.99 a month or $167.99 a year and offers enhanced, generative-AI-powered conversation features. 

Despite some about the limitations of the language learning tool and a recent kerfuffle over how much AI would shape the product, Duolingo’s reported for 2025 were $252.3 million, up from $178.3 million a year ago.

Nicole Paxton, principal of Mountain Vista Community School in Colorado Springs, said her school relies upon Math Catalyst, a teacher-led, concept-focused program from . It is not a computer-based game, but “a structured set of mini-lessons and practice activities that target specific learning gaps and build strong mathematical reasoning”, she said. 

“If used as a supplement at home, a program like Duolingo Math could be helpful for fluency and fact practice, but it would not replace the intentional, standards-based support students receive through Math Catalyst,” Paxton said. 

Earle said the program also allows for personalization using machine learning to tailor each lesson. Once it identifies a weakness in students’ understanding, it will present them with these same problems until they can solve them. 

But the main purpose of the venture, software engineer Siegel said, is to make math feel fun.

“Duolingo is really delightful,” she said. “That’s our bread and butter.”

Mayor Eric Adams and schools Chancellor David C. Banks unveiled the initiative, “,” earlier this week, saying they hoped to build off the success of “NYC Reads.” 

Starting in the fall, 93 middle schools and 420 high schools will use the , open-source Illustrative Mathematics curriculum, which is . Schools in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle also use the curriculum.

Like many school systems across the country, New York City, the nation’s largest, has long struggled with the subject. in 2023, but the figure is stubbornly low and is even worse for some student groups: of the city’s Black and Latino children are not performing at grade level in the subject. 

“Schools all over the city, even on math, were just kind of doing their own thing — people just creating their own curriculum,” Banks said during a televised press conference. “That’s no way to run a system.” 

I’m proud to be following the groundbreaking rollout of ‘NYC Reads’ with ‘NYC Solves,’ reimagining math education and ensuring students and educators have access to high-quality instructional materials and support.

— Chancellor David C. Banks (@DOEChancellor)

The chancellor did not blame teachers, administrators or students for their struggle, saying they just needed a better framework. Marielys Divanne, executive director of Educators for Excellence-New York, said her group has been pushing for change for years: More than 1,000 of her 16,000 members signed a petition urging the city to act on the issue.

“Our educators feel that NYC Solves is a much-needed step forward in making progress in addressing our crisis in math instruction,” Divanne said, adding that the previous, school-by-school approach left “thousands of students with low quality instructional materials and uneven support for educators.” 

In addition to the mathematics initiative, Adams also announced the creation of the Division of Inclusive and Accessible Learning, which aims to support multilingual learners and students with disabilities. The division will have a $750 million budget — and roughly 1,300 staff members.

Maria Klawe, president of Math for America, a non-profit organization founded 20 years ago to keep outstanding math teachers in the classroom, lauded the city’s choice of Illustrative Mathematics, calling it a very strong curriculum. She had already reviewed some of the materials and praised its approach in taking math from the theoretical to the practical.

“The whole idea is trying to help students understand that a mathematical concept, even if it’s abstract in nature, is actually something that you encounter in your daily life,” she said. “You have a sense that what you’re learning is … something that you can actually use.”

William McCallum, Illustrative Mathematics’s CEO and co-founder, was a lead writer of the Common Core State Standards in math. He said, through a spokesperson, that IM’s work “has evolved far beyond its original focus on illustrating the standards.”

The Common Core had a bumpy roll-out, was maligned by some parents and . The math portion became a , though it has won favor in academic circles.

McCallum strongly recommends teacher training for those who seek to implement Illustrative Mathematics. 

“The curriculum supports a problem-based instructional model that is a shift for many teachers, and they have the most success when they have the support they need to make that shift,” he said. “IM and its partners offer professional learning for those districts that want it.”

Klawe also credited Department of Education officials for making the curriculum the standard for schools. She said it allows teachers to work together across the city to share best practices. 

“It’s also very helpful for students who move from one school to another,” she added. 

New York City officials say each curriculum has been reviewed and recommended by , a nationally recognized nonprofit organization. The curriculum also has undergone a formal review by a committee of New York City Public school educators including those with expertise in mathematics, special education and multilingual learners — in addition to district-based mathematics specialists. 

Minus charter schools, there were close to in the NYC school system as of fall 2023. Nearly 73% of students were economically disadvantaged. 

Like Klawe, , executive director of The Education Trust–New York, favors the uniform curriculum, though she notes it might not be the preference for all. 

“Different schools have different feelings about that,” she noted. She added that the approach does, however, relieve teachers from the arduous task of having to develop their own curriculum, allowing them to instead focus on implementation.

But teacher Meredith Klein, who worked for more than a decade at before switching to West Brooklyn Community High School, which serves under-credited students, said the new curriculum might not satisfy all kids’ needs. 

“I’ve always worked with a really specialized population of students and the curriculum is usually not designed with them in mind,” she said.

Klein has spent the past year implementing Illustrative Mathematics as part of the pilot program and said she struggled to adapt the materials for her students. While the city initially pushed for strict adherence to a pre-set learning schedule, the coach who visited with her to help with the rollout soon recognized the need for adaptation. 

“The curriculum is written like a story and you need to teach the full curriculum without any alterations for a full year,” she said, but that’s not the educational experience of so many of the students she’s served. “There wasn’t any guidance about how to break it up … how to retrofit it to our existing system. Not all students are the same.” 

“Standards-based reform” in the heyday of the education reform movement was a bit like the title of a recent film: Everything Everywhere All at Once. The strategy of setting statewide standards, measuring student performance against those standards, and then holding schools accountable for the results was at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and dominated education policy for most of the “long NCLB period” from the 1990s into the 2010s. To many observers, standards-based reform was education reform, and so the question about whether standards-based reform worked is equivalent to asking whether education reform worked.

Answering that question is only possible if we define what’s in and what’s out: What counts under the umbrella of standards-based reform? Did it succeed as an overall strategy? Were there individual components that were particularly effective?

In this chapter, we will work our way through these and related questions, but readers should beware that the results will not be entirely satisfying. Get ready for a lot of shrugging. We know, for example, that student achievement improved markedly in the late 1990s and early 2000s—the very time that states were starting to put standards, tests, and “consequential accountability” into place. Some of the gains can be directly attributed to those policies. But the improvement was likely driven by other factors, too, some of which had very little to do with education policy or even schools, such as the plummeting child poverty rate at the time.

On the flip side, when student achievement plateaued and even started to decline in the 2010s, it’s plausible that the tapering off was related to the softening of school-level accountability, as NCLB lost steam and eventually gave way to the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Common Core State Standards. But hard evidence is scant, and it’s difficult to know for sure, especially because—again—so much else was going on at the same time. That included the aftermath of the Great Recession (and its budget cuts) as well as the advent of smartphones and social media, which may have depressed student achievement just as they boosted teenage anxiety and depression.

And while we know that standards, testing, and especially accountability drove some of the improvements in student outcomes in the 1990s and 2000s, especially in math, we unfortunately have limited information about exactly what schools did to get those better results. For the most part, the “black box” that is the typical K–12 classroom stayed shut.

Here’s the good news: despite all these uncertainties, there’s still much we can learn from the era of standards-based reform—both for future efforts to use standards, assessments, and accountability to improve outcomes and for education reform writ large.

A short history of standards-based reform

The NCLB Act locked into place a specific version of standards-based reform, one that incorporated a mishmash of ideas that had been floating around since the 1980s and arguably since the 1960s. Think of it like a dish at a fusion restaurant, reflecting a novel combination of flavors and culinary lineages—not always with a satisfying outcome.

One might even say that this version of standards-based reform was incoherent—which is ironic, given that coherence was arguably the number-one goal of the original progenitors of the idea. In a series of articles and books in the late 1980s, scholars Jennifer O’Day and Marshall Smith argued for what they called “systemic reform.” Their key insight was that the multiple layers of governance baked into the US education system as well as myriad conflicting policies emanating from the many cooks in the K–12 kitchen were pulling educators in too many directions. What we needed was to fix the system as a whole, to think comprehensively and coherently and thereby get everyone rowing in the same direction in pursuit of stronger and more equitable student outcomes.

To do so, we needed to get serious about “alignment.” We should start with a clear set of desired outcomes, also known as standards, delineating what we expect students to know and be able to do—at the end of high school but also at key milestones along the way. Those curricular standards would set forth both the content of what kids needed to learn and the level at which they needed to learn it. Regular assessments would help practitioners and policymakers understand whether kids were on track to meet expectations and ready to progress to the next grade level and, ultimately, high school graduation. This approach would allow for the assessment of student performance against common expectations and criteria rather than measuring students against one another (norm-referenced evaluation and rankings) to determine academic achievement. But perhaps most importantly, all the other key pieces of the education apparatus needed to be aligned to the standards as well—especially teacher preparation, professional development, instructional materials, and funding systems.

O’Day and Smith didn’t say much about “accountability” as we would later come to talk about it—consequences that would accrue to educators, especially for poor student performance. Instead, their focus was primarily on coherence, alignment, and building “capacity” in the system to improve teaching and learning.

Systemic reform was popular with traditional education groups. It spoke to the frustration of classroom teachers as well as principals and superintendents, without directly threatening the political power of key constituencies, especially teachers’ unions. They welcomed the additional help envisioned by scholars such as O’Day and Smith—and the additional money.

But this approach was hardly the only school improvement game in town. Other ideas were gaining prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, too, ideas promulgated by governors, economists, political scientists, and business leaders. To oversimplify a bit, they coalesced around the “reinventing government” frame — namely that to reform a broken system like K–12 education, leaders needed to embrace a “tight-loose” strategy: tight about the results to be accomplished and loose about how people closer to the problem might get there. This was how business titans of the time steered their organizations, especially as the economy was shifting to knowledge work. To get the best results, people on the front lines had to have the autonomy to make decisions and solve problems themselves in real time rather than take orders from the top. They should be rewarded when they improved productivity accordingly. But if they failed to generate the desired results, unpleasantness might be expected to follow. They might even lose their jobs.

This struck a chord among some education scholars as well. As far back as 1966’s Coleman Report, we knew about the disconnect between education inputs and outcomes. If we wanted better results, it made sense to focus on the latter. Furthermore, many of the reforms embraced in the wake of 1983’s A Nation at Risk report tried to tweak inputs such as teacher salaries, course requirements, and days in the school year. In an era of stagnant achievement and widening achievement gaps, none of that seemed to be working. It was time, many thought, for something else.

By the early 1990s, the tight-loose frame was a big driver behind the charter schools movement and the notion of “accountability for results” for public schools writ large. Lamar Alexander, who was governor of Tennessee before becoming US secretary of education under George H. W. Bush, was apt to talk about “an old-fashioned horse trade”: greater autonomy for schools and educators in return for greater accountability for improved student outcomes. And it wasn’t just Republican governors who embraced this model; several Democratic ones did, too, especially southern governors such as Jim Hunt (North Carolina), Richard Riley (South Carolina), and Bill Clinton (Arkansas). It helped that the Progressive Policy Institute—a think tank for the New Dems—supported this approach enthusiastically.

This version of standards-based reform had some overlap with O’Day and Smith’s systemic reform, especially when it came to the centrality of academic standards. But it put greater emphasis on the measurement of achievement against those standards—in other words, high-stakes testing—and especially on accountability measures connected to results. This reflected the thinking of both economists and political scientists, who thought that the right incentives might allow local schools and school systems to break through the political barriers to change. With enough pressure from on high, schools might finally put the needs of kids first rather than follow the lead of adult interest groups, especially unions. They would remove ineffective teachers from the classroom, for example, ditch misguided curricula, and untie the hands of principals. The assumption was that the major barrier to improvement was not incoherence or the lack of capacity per se, but small-p politics and, especially, union politics. Getting the incentives right by tying real accountability to results could take a sledgehammer to the political status quo in communities nationwide.

This made sense to some key actors on the political left as well, especially the Education Trust and other civil rights organizations. They bought into this version of standards-based reform but with an important twist: doing right by kids would be defined primarily as doing right by kids who had been mistreated by the education system. That meant Black, Hispanic, and low-income students especially. These reformers wanted to counterbalance the political power of the unions but also that of affluent parents and other actors who tended to steer resources to the children and families who needed them the least. They wanted to use top-down accountability to redirect money, qualified teachers, and attention to the highest-poverty schools and the most disadvantaged kids.

These various flavors of standards-based reform were all in the mix in the 1990s, with many public discussions in particular about the wisdom of a strategy focused on “capacity building” versus one that stressed “accountability for results.” The enactment of NCLB settled the debate; the accountability hawks won. Capacity building would mostly be put on the shelf in favor of a muscular, federally driven effort to hold schools accountable, especially for the achievement of the groups that most concerned civil rights leaders.

Enter No Child Left Behind

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the Bush-era reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, was the law of the land for an entire generation of students. The kids who entered kindergarten in the fall of 2002, nine months after then president George W. Bush put his signature on NCLB, were seniors in high school in December 2015 when then president Barack Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act (its reauthorized successor).

That’s not to say that the same policy was set in stone for those thirteen years. For the first half of its life, federal officials implemented it rather faithfully, but the second half came with major policy shifts driven by regulatory actions and what might be termed “strategic nonenforcement.” Let’s take a brief trip down memory lane.

“NCLB-classic”—which was the 2001 reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act—centered on the three-legged stool of standards, tests, and accountability. But those three elements were not treated with the same level of prescription. States had complete control over their standards—both in terms of the content to be included and in terms of the level of performance that would be considered good enough. Not so when it came to the tests—those had to be given annually to students in grades three through eight in reading and in math, plus once in high school, plus three times in science. And the assessments had to meet a variety of technical requirements.

But where NCLB’s designers really got prescriptive was around accountability requirements. They created a measure called adequate yearly progress, which judged schools against statewide targets for performance and decreed that subgroups of students—the major racial groups plus low-income kids, students with disabilities, and English learners—would need to hit those targets as well. If schools failed to achieve any of their goals in a given year, they would face a cascade of sanctions that grew more severe with each unsuccessful year. Students would have the right to attend other public schools in their same district and, eventually, to receive “supplemental education services” (i.e., free tutoring) from private providers. Districts were charged with intervening in low-performing schools with ever-increasing intensity.

NCLB had a plethora of other provisions, from mandating that schools hire only “highly qualified teachers” to bringing “scientifically based reading instruction” (now called the science of reading) to the nation’s schools. Some of these other pieces could be considered capacitybuilding efforts. But overwhelmingly, NCLB was about accountability for results. It assumed that with enough pressure, schools and districts would cut through the Gordian knot that was holding them back in order to raise the achievement of students, especially those from marginalized groups. That was the theory. And as we’ll get to in a moment, it partly worked.

But it also soon became clear that many schools and systems didn’t know what to do in response to the accountability pressure—or couldn’t steel themselves to make the requisite changes in long-established practices and structures. Some educators narrowed the curriculum, significantly expanding the time spent on math and reading at the expense of other subjects. Stories filled the nation’s newspapers about schools teaching to the test, canceling recess, even ignoring lice outbreaks, all because of the accountability pressures of NCLB. In perhaps the most notable education scandal, teachers and principals in the Atlanta Public Schools district were found to have cheated on state-administered tests by providing students with the correct answers to questions and even changing students’ answers and modifying test sheets to ensure higher scores.

NCLB Evolves

As with most federal statutes, Congress was supposed to update NCLB after a few years. A reauthorization push in 2007 came close to doing so and would have made the law even tougher, but it fell apart under fierce opposition from teachers’ unions and other education advocacy groups. So the law lumbered on even as it became clearer to its strongest supporters, including then education secretary Margaret Spellings, that parts of it were becoming unworkable.

One of the major issues was that an increasing number of schools were failing to meet NCLB’s adequate yearly progress provisions. If tens of thousands of schools were deemed subpar, then the sting and stigma were lost, as was much of the motivation to do something to fix it. In particular, the law’s focus on achievement rather than progress over time was snaring virtually all high-poverty schools in its trap, given the enduring relationship between test scores and kids’ socioeconomic backgrounds. Now that annual tests were in place, and states had, with federal money and support, built more sophisticated data systems, it was technically feasible to measure individual students’ progress from one year to the next. Such measures were much fairer to schools whose students arrived several years below grade level. But these growth models weren’t contemplated back in 2001, so they weren’t allowed under the law.

Through a series of regulatory actions, Spellings (under George W. Bush) and Arne Duncan (under Obama) allowed states to make critical changes to their implementation of NCLB to address these concerns. They allowed growth models provided the models still expected students to hit “proficiency” within a few years. They loosened rules around supplemental services so that school districts could provide tutoring themselves rather than outsource it to private providers. The cascade of sanctions was replaced with a menu of intervention options and funded generously through the School Improvement Grants program—all meant to encourage “school turnarounds.” An Obama-era waiver program allowed states even greater flexibility to tinker with their accountability targets in return for commitments to embrace other reforms the administration supported.

Meanwhile, states were working to address another key issue with NCLB: its encouragement of low level academic standards and much-too-easy-to-pass tests. Because the law required states to set targets that would result in virtually all students reaching the “proficient” level by 2014, it incentivized states to set the proficiency bar very low. This, in turn, may have encouraged educators to engage in low-level instruction, with teaching to the test and “drill and kill” methods. It also provided parents with misleading information, as states told most parents that their children were “proficient” in reading and math, even if they were actually several years below grade level and nowhere near on track for college or a decent-paying career. In Tennessee, for example, the state reported that 90 percent of students were “proficient” in fourth-grade reading in 2009 while the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had the number at 28 percent. Advocates came to call this the “honesty gap.”

Under the leadership of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, states started collaborating on a set of common standards for English language arts and math—what would eventually become the Common Core State Standards. The hope was that, by working together and providing political cover to one another, the states would finally set the bar suitably high—at a level that indicated that high school graduates were truly ready for college or career and that would encourage teachers to aim for higher-level teaching. It would certainly be hard for the effort to result in worse standards than what most states had in place. Multiple reviews of state standards over the years from the American Federation of Teachers, Achieve, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that they were generally vague, poorly written, and lacking in the type of curricular content that “systemic reformers” had envisioned so many years before.10 It wasn’t surprising, then, that so many educators reported teaching to the test. The tests became the true standards, and they were perceived to be of low quality too.

The Common Core standards were adopted by more than forty states in 2010 and 2011, changing the very foundation of NCLB’s architecture. No longer were states aiming to get low-achieving students to basic literacy and numeracy; now the goal was to get everyone to college and career readiness. But that shift was largely overlooked at the time, drowned out by a fierce political backlash to the Common Core. It mostly came from the right, as the newly emerging conservative populist movement seized on Obama’s involvement in encouraging the adoption of the standards (through his Race to the Top [RttT] initiative). Nonetheless, by 2015, more than a dozen states were using new assessments tied to the standards (largely paid for through RttT funds), and even today, most states still use the Common Core standards or close facsimiles.

So did standards-based reform work during the NCLB era?

As mentioned before, judging the success or failure of such a sprawling reform effort is hard to do. Thankfully, scholars Dan Goldhaber and Michael DeArmond of the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research offered a wonderful overview of the research literature in a recent report for the US Chamber of Commerce, Looking Back to Look Forward: Quantitative and Qualitative Reviews of the Past 20 Years of K–12 Education Assessment and Accountability Policy. I strongly encourage readers to review their findings; allow me to summarize them here.

First, it’s clear that student achievement in the United States improved dramatically from the mid to late 1990s until the early 2010s—especially in math, especially at the elementary and middle school levels, and especially for the most marginalized student groups. Pointing to studies by M. Danish Shakeel, Paul Peterson, Eric Hanushek, Ayesha Hashim, Sean Reardon, and others, Goldhaber and DeArmond conclude that “the long-term gains on the NAEP reveal a decades-long narrowing of test score achievement gaps between underserved groups (e.g., students of color, lower achieving students) and more advantaged groups (e.g., White students, higher achieving students).”

My own analysis of NAEP trends from that time period focused on the impressive gains made by the nation’s low-income, Black, and Hispanic students, especially at the lower levels of achievement. The proportion of Black fourth-graders scoring at the “below basic” level on the NAEP reading exam, for example, dropped from more than two-thirds in 1992 to less than half in 2015. Likewise, the percentage of Hispanic eighth-graders scoring “below basic” in math dropped from two-thirds in 1990 to 40 percent in 2015. Those numbers were still much too high, but the improvement over time was breathtaking.

Nor was it just student achievement. High school graduation rates shot up as well, climbing fifteen points on average from the mid-1990s until today. We saw major improvements in college completion, too, with the percentage of Black and Hispanic young adults with four-year degrees climbing from 15 percent and 9 percent, respectively, in 1995 to 23 percent and 21 percent by 2017. Some analysts have argued that these improvements might reflect a softening of graduation standards, but rigorous studies have found that a significant proportion of the gains were real.

Alas, the progress in test scores stalled in the early to mid-2010s, and achievement even declined in some subjects and grade levels in the late 2010s, before the pandemic wiped out decades of gains. As Goldhaber and DeArmond explain, this has led some analysts to argue that the rise and fall of test-based accountability can explain the rise and fall of student achievement.

That’s possible, but NAEP’s design makes it hard to know for sure. What scholars can do is compare states with various policies (and policy implementation timelines) to try to link the adoption of standards-based reform to changes in student achievement. That’s exactly what a series of studies did in the 2000s, including ones by Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb, another by Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond, and a seminal paper by Tom Dee and Brian Jacob. The latter compared states that adopted “consequential accountability” in the late 1990s to those that adopted it in the early 2000s, once NCLB mandated them to do so. Dee and Jacob found large impacts of those policies on math achievement (an effect size in the neighborhood of half a year of learning), with even greater effects for the lowest-achieving students as well as Black, Hispanic, and low-income kids. The impacts on reading and science were null.

Another study, by Manyee Wong, Thomas D. Cook, and Peter M. Steiner, used Catholic schools as a control group and found more evidence that accountability policies raised achievement in math in the public schools. Other research, also reviewed by Goldhaber and DeArmond, looked at the impact of NCLB on the so-called bubble kids—the students who were closest to the proficiency line or the schools most at risk of sanctions. Most studies found the largest gains for such students and schools, for better or worse.

A brand-new study, by Ozkan Eren, David N. Figlio, Naci H. Mocan, and Orgul Ozturk, found that accountability policies had an impact on more than just test scores. “Our findings indicate that a school’s receipt of a lower accountability rating, at the bottom end of the ratings distribution, decreases adult criminal involvement. Accountability pressures also reduce the propensity of students’ reliance on social welfare programs in adulthood and these effects persist at least until when individuals reach their early 30s.”

Circumstantial evidence from individual states also points to a big impact from consequential accountability. Massachusetts, which combined standards-based reform with an enormous increase in spending in its 1993 Education Reform Act, saw student achievement skyrocket in the late 1990s and early 2000s—the much-remarked “Massachusetts miracle.” Fourth-grade reading scores increased by nineteen points from 1998 through 2007—the equivalent of about two grade levels. Eighth-grade math scores jumped thirty-one points from 2000 to 2009. With its high-quality academic standards, intensive supports for teachers, lavish funding, and new high school graduation exam for students, the Bay State showed what was possible.

Nor was Massachusetts alone. Other states made significant progress, too, including Texas and North Carolina in the 1990s, Florida in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mississippi in the 2010s, and the District of Columbia throughout the entire reform period.

What we can say, then, is that NCLB-style accountability worked, at least for a while and at least in math. Nationally, it didn’t make an impact in reading, even though reading achievement was improving during the NCLB era (including in states like Massachusetts and Mississippi). We also aren’t sure if achievement plateaued in the 2010s because accountability necessarily stopped working or because accountability stopped.

It doesn’t help that we don’t have much evidence about the mechanisms that might have driven the gains Dee and Jacob (and others) found. Did schools improve their approach to teaching mathematics? Did they make more time for intensive interventions such as tutoring, especially for their lowest-performing kids? Did they work harder or smarter to support teachers and get their best folks where they were needed most? Why did accountability lead to gains in math but not in reading?

We only have a few studies on how these policies might have changed classroom practice. As mentioned above, it was widely perceived that schools—especially elementary schools, where the schedule is more flexible—narrowed the curriculum and spent more time on math and reading and less time on social studies and science. Several teacher surveys showed this to be the case.19 (Perhaps that’s one reason standards-based reform failed to move the needle on reading achievement, given the growing evidence linking content knowledge in subjects like social studies to improvements in reading comprehension.) The improvement of scores for bubble kids indicates that schools and teachers may have shifted their attention to kids near the proficiency line. And teaching to the test was also thought to be pervasive; some teacher surveys, for example, found that instruction became more teacher centered and focused on basic skills.

Alas, studying policy implementation all the way into the classroom is difficult and expensive. So save from surveying teachers about their practice—which is better than nothing but not terribly reliable—not much else was done. As a result, when it comes to changes that standards-based reform might have brought to the classroom, we have more questions than answers.

School improvement, school choice and school closure

In 2009, the Obama administration successfully lobbied Congress to allocate $3.5 billion (eventually growing to $7 billion) into the Title I School Improvement Grants program. This sum was directed primarily to the 5 percent of schools in each state with the lowest academic achievement. The federal government instructed districts to select from four intervention options, from replacing the principal to closing the school entirely. Most selected the least onerous option, and perhaps for that reason, a federal evaluation of the effort found no impacts on test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment.

However, as Goldhaber and DeArmond explain, some local and state studies did find positive impacts arising from the SIG initiative. California’s implementation was particularly well studied by scholars including Thomas Dee, Susanna Loeb, Min Sun, Emily K. Penner, and Katharine O. Strunk.25 Both statewide and in particular cities, the results were generally positive, with improvements in both reading and math. This may be because California required its lowest-performing schools to implement more intensive interventions. It also focused a great deal of money—up to $1.5 million—on each school and gave the school lots of help in spending it well.

Though not addressed by Goldhaber and DeArmond, another place to look for lessons on accountability is the school choice movement. In particular, we can compare the relative success of charter schools with private school choice, given that the former operates under a strict accountability regime while the latter, in most states, does not. A growing body of research, including a new study from CREDO at Stanford University, shows charter school students outpacing their traditional public school peers both on test scores and on long-term outcomes such as college completion. That is especially the case for urban charter schools and for Black and Hispanic students.

Private school choice programs, on the other hand, have been markedly less effective in boosting student outcomes, at least as judged by test scores. Recent studies of large-scale voucher programs in Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana all show voucher recipients trailing their public school peers on test score growth, sometimes quite significantly. To be sure, another set of voucher studies finds positive long-term impacts on measures such as high school graduation and college enrollment. But the negative findings on achievement are still worrying and might reflect the lack of consequential accountability baked into these programs.

In the charter schools sector, authorizers are empowered to close low-performing or financially unsustainable schools, and they do so with regularity. This is real accountability, and the threat of closure very likely contributes to—perhaps even causes much of—the charter achievement advantage.

What’s less clear, once again, are the exact mechanisms. Does the threat of school closure encourage charter schools to improve? Perhaps—and a series of studies from the Fordham Institute and others have found that charter schools tend to embrace a variety of practices associated with improved achievement, from higher teacher expectations to greater teacher diversity to firmer policies around student discipline. On the other hand, it’s surely the case that school closures themselves automatically improve the performance of the charter sector, as the worst schools disappear, shifting the bell curve of achievement to the right. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that accountability plays a key role in the relative success of charter schools.

Unresolved tensions in standards-based reform

Accountability versus capacity building:

The most fateful decision in the history of standards-based reform might have been the move—cemented by NCLB — to place accountability at the heart of the strategy while largely neglecting capacity building; in other words, to assume that the only problem was the lack of will rather than skill. As Robert Pondiscio argues in chapter 5 of this series, that decision was particularly critical when it came to the issue of curriculum. Even those of us who believe in the importance of standards understand that they don’t teach themselves, nor do they provide day-to-day guidance to teachers on how to instruct students in an effective, engaging, evidence-based way.

Yet only in recent years have reformers embraced curriculum as a key lever for school improvement, with foundations and even states investing in building high-quality instructional materials and organizations such as EdReports judging them for alignment with rigorous standards. Imagine how much more progress we might have made had we embarked on these efforts twenty years earlier!

Yet that would have been hard to do, since back then states were just developing their standards, and they differed dramatically from one another even as most were of low quality. Only with the creation of the Common Core State Standards was there an opportunity to build a truly national marketplace for curricular materials, which is exactly what has happened in recent years. As high-quality products like Core Knowledge Language Arts and Eureka Math gain market share, we might be returning to the capacity-building effort we ditched so many decades ago. Perhaps fixing teacher preparation and professional development can come next.

It’s become clear that states need to show leadership around curriculum and instruction rather than sit back and hope districts make the right decisions on their own. States that have done so over the past twenty-five years—including, at various times, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Mississippi—have seen improvements in achievement (though, of course, correlation does not equal causation).

Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?:

As with so much else about this topic, it’s hard to know whether there were particular components of standards-based reform that made a bigger difference than others. As explained earlier, seminal studies found that it was “consequential accountability” that led to test score gains in the late 1990s and early 2000s—which meant some sort of system to classify schools and some legitimate threat that something might happen to those deemed low-performing. My vague language is intentional. State policies, especially pre-NCLB, varied greatly, and yet scholars still detected an impact on achievement. We can say, then, that the threat of rating schools as poor and potentially taking action was enough to move the needle—at least when these policies were first introduced.

It’s likely, though, that when accountability systems were discovered to be mostly bark and no bite—because state officials were loath to follow through and actually shutter schools—these impacts faded. That brought us to a new stage, when the federal government spent billions of dollars through the School Improvement Grants program to turn around low-performing schools. This was a helping-hand approach rather than tough love, and as discussed earlier, it mostly didn’t work.

Nor can we make strong claims about the standards and assessments that are at the heart of standards-based reform. Scholars have failed to detect any difference in achievement in states that had low standards versus high ones or weak tests versus strong ones. As they say, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It’s hard to believe that the quality of standards and assessments does not matter; rather, it’s more likely that to drive positive change, demanding expectations and tests must be connected to sophisticated school rating systems; meaningful accountability for results; and capacity-building efforts, like the introduction of high-quality curricular materials, to help students succeed.

The lesson for standards-based reform—and many other reforms as well—is that policymakers can’t view components as items on an à la carte menu. In order to drive improvements, it’s all or nothing. Especially in the push for “systemic,” coherent reform, the effort is only as strong as its weakest link. If the question is which is most important (standards, assessments, school ratings, consequences, turnaround efforts, or capacity building, especially around curriculum), the correct answer is “all of the above.”

Common standards versus student variation:

Other key issues that reformers often swept under the rug were (1) the inevitable conflict between the desire to set a single, high standard for achievement and the undeniable reality that kids come into school with widely varying levels of readiness and may need varying amounts of support and time to reach standard; and (2) that schools and school systems in the United States have historically underserved and under-supported students experiencing poverty and students with lower socioeconomic status.

The standards-based reform movement succeeded in promoting the idea that “all students can learn” and that we must reject the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” These are powerful and necessary maxims. But they rub up against the lived experience of educators, who must cope with the reality of classrooms of students who can be as many as seven grade levels apart on the first day of school.

Slogans about “holding schools accountable for results” elide critical questions over the details. Results for which students? All of them? Including the ones who start the school year way above or way below grade level? The embrace of “growth models” in the late NCLB period and under ESSA helped to circle this square. By focusing on progress from one school year to the next, accountability systems could give schools credit for helping all of their students make gains, no matter where they started on the achievement spectrum.

NCLB had an answer to this question, implicit though it may have been: the sharp focus of NCLB was on helping the lowest-achieving students—who tended to be Black, Hispanic, or low-income, or students with disabilities, or those still learning English—reach basic standards. And as discussed earlier, this focus worked for a time (again mostly in math) as those were the precise groups whose achievement rose the most during the 1990s and 2000s and who were much more likely to graduate from high school in the 2010s. But did this hyperfocus unintentionally incentivize the success and growth of some students over others? And was getting these students to a baseline level of proficiency setting them up for postsecondary success?

Tests as accountability metrics versus instructional tools:

Another key conflict throughout the standards-based reform era was the role of testing. To put it mildly, “high-stakes tests” were not (and are not) popular—with the general public, parents, and especially educators—even though “accountability” in education polls quite well.

The pushback to testing has been significant. Some of that stemmed from how schools responded to the tests—as discussed earlier, by “teaching to the test” or narrowing the curriculum. Some of it related to the Obama-era push to tie teacher evaluations to test scores. Some of it focused on the tests themselves. Making kids sit for annual assessments from grades three through eight ate up precious instructional time. But since the results didn’t come back until months later—even until the next school year—they weren’t of much help to educators. They weren’t “instructionally useful.” Thus, most school districts opted to give students additional standardized tests, such as NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress, in
order to receive real-time information about how students were doing. One study found students spending as many as twenty-five hours a year sitting for tests.

In recent years, some advocates and assessment providers have called for testing systems that can produce both accountability data and instructionally useful information for educators. That’s an understandable impulse, but trade-offs are unavoidable. Some approaches would assess students three times a year, for example—so-called through-year assessments—which might increase the testing load and encourage schools to adopt a curriculum closely aligned with the scope and sequence of the tests, for better or worse. Assessments that return results immediately, meanwhile, are by definition not graded by humans, and (so far at least) they can’t test the same higher-order skills that the better state assessments today can. This might encourage a return to low-level teaching of the skill-and-drill variety.

A key issue going forward is whether states will pursue these more instructionally useful assessment systems or simply acknowledge that we need a variety of tests, some to guide instruction and others to generate accountability data, as unpopular as the latter may be.

Lessons for the future

What can tomorrow’s policymakers learn from our experience with standards, assessments, and accountability?

• Be clear-eyed about capacity in the system. Some of us wrongly assumed that incentives were the only big problem—that once we put pressure on schools to improve, they would figure out how to help their students meet standards. What standards-based reform revealed, however, was how little capacity existed in many schools. Educators didn’t know how to boost achievement, or they only knew how to do this for some kids in their schools. They didn’t know what curricula to use. And accountability wasn’t generally strong enough to overcome the political incentives operating in the system, especially union politics. Reformers can’t wish realities like these away. Fixing perverse incentives is necessary but not sufficient; capacity building is needed too. And that means states need to take a more muscular role around issues like curriculum and teacher preparation than some of us once imagined.

• Be wary of any reform that is about “all” students (or all schools). Yes, all kids need to learn to read, write, and do math, and virtually all students can reach basic standards. But not all kids need to (or can be) college ready. Reforms that don’t come to terms with the huge variability in kids’ readiness levels, cognitive abilities, and prior achievements will lose popular support and will flounder.

• Don’t take success for granted! Especially in the wake of the awful COVID-19 pandemic and its disastrous impact on our schools, it’s hard not to romanticize the period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when achievement was skyrocketing. What we wouldn’t give to have those test score gains back! Yet the education debate at the time wasn’t full of celebration and confidence, but angst about things not moving quickly enough. What we need to remember is that education happens slowly, year by year, and we need to make sure that policy leaders stay on course over a long period of time. We should fight the urge to look for the “next big thing.” At the current moment, for example, there’s much enthusiasm about universal education savings accounts as new and exciting, in contrast to charter schools, which feel old and dated to some. Yet based on their strong track record, slowly but surely continuing to expand high-quality charter schools may be the best approach to improving student outcomes and expanding parental options. Policymakers, advocates, and philanthropists need to get better at finishing what we started.

• Scholars need new ways to study policy change all the way to the classroom. Thanks in part to the data produced by standards-based reforms, the field of education research has improved markedly in recent decades. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs are much more common, and every day brings important new findings about interventions and their impact on student outcomes. Yet as this chapter demonstrates, we still struggle to follow policy changes all the way down to the classroom. But that doesn’t have to be a given. It’s now technically and financially feasible to put cameras and microphones in classrooms nationwide to collect detailed information about teaching and learning. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence will soon allow us to analyze such data to gain insights about curriculum implementation, effective instructional strategies, grouping practices, student discipline, and much else. The question is whether we will have the political will to make this vision a reality while ensuring safeguards for teacher and student privacy.

The conventional wisdom in some quarters is that standards-based reform in general, and NCLB in particular, didn’t work. That conventional wisdom is incorrect. These policies deserve some of the credit for the historically large achievement gains of the 1990s and 2000s and the equally impressive improvements in the high school graduation and college completion rates of more recent years.

But this approach to reform will work much better if it is combined with efforts to boost the knowledge, skills, and confidence of educators on the front lines. Providing high-quality instructional materials is arguably the best way to do that, and it’s an effort that states have finally embarked upon. This is still no panacea; the Gordian knot hasn’t been sliced through, nor have teachers’ unions disappeared, nor have we solved the riddle of how to get fourteen thousand school districts to embrace smart policies and practices. Systemic dysfunction remains. But a recommitment to accountability for results, along with a focus on making classroom instruction more coherent, effective, and equitable, could yield stronger results in the years ahead.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

Standards are not curriculum. And yet, far too many ELA curricula in use today have put them at the center of literacy instruction, with disappointing results. How did we get here?

I want to shoulder some of the blame. I served as a co-author of the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts, published in 2010. We developed those standards by identifying the progression of specific skills and competencies students should master in each grade across four domains: reading, writing, speaking/listening, and features of language like grammar and vocabulary.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this design had the unintended consequence of standards alignment overpowering nearly all other considerations — including how the standards were being taught. Too often, schools and teachers directed to “meet the standards” responded by teaching ELA as a mechanical series of content-agnostic, skill-based activities. And curriculum vendors retooled their offerings to put standards at the center, especially after reviews by EdReports and others revealed the vast differences among curricula in their alignment to standards.

Those ratings have helped redefine instructional quality and brought a much broader range of curriculum developers to the fore. But they rely on a blunt metric. An ELA curriculum can earn a positive rating if it lines up with discrete, grade-level standards. While valuable, these reviews are incomplete. They fail to account for an important admonition contained in the Common Core State Standards we made sure to include:

In fact, the Standards mention the importance of knowledge-building more than 100 times.

Fortunately, a handful of publishers took this guidance to heart and created a new generation of ELA curricula unparalleled in their potential to drive reading success. They are designed to go deep on content. In the knowledge-based classrooms that use them, students are learning to read through the joyful exploration of reading to learn.

These best-in-class, knowledge-rich reading curricula ground instruction in high-interest topical units, based on that literacy and knowledge go hand in hand. Through coherent, thoughtfully sequenced activities, these curricula teach phonics and core literacy skills while growing student knowledge about the natural and human world. They use complex texts and scaffolding supports that grant all students access to grade-level content. The knowledge they build is like an interest-bearing savings account: the more students know, the faster they learn and the better readers they become.

Systematically growing knowledge is an essential equity investment. Beginning in the earliest grades, knowledge-building is a vital strategy to accelerate learning and grant all students access to grade-level content. And it sets the stage for a lifetime of critical inquiry and analysis.

Sadly, these content-rich ELA curricula are not yet used in enough American classrooms to make a real dent in our national reading crisis — an especially urgent goal given the persistent adverse effects of pandemic-related school closures.

Let me be clear. While standards can and should set the bar for annual learning targets, they shouldn’t be used to define the particulars of daily classroom instruction. Fluent reading is built on skills, yes, but it is ultimately fueled by curiosity and the desire to make meaning. Nobody picks up a text to practice finding the main idea of a paragraph. Rather, they learn to find the main idea by engaging with a text because it’s interesting, opens a window into new knowledge or offers a unique insight. What if, instead of foregrounding skills, students were learning about dinosaurs, butterflies, or the American Revolution, and mastering reading skills along the way?

That’s the crucial difference between high-quality, knowledge-based reading curricula and curricula that are merely standards-aligned and only touch on texts and topics that don’t add up to building a coherent body of knowledge.

A new curriculum review tool, recently published by the Knowledge Matters Campaign, is designed to help states and school districts differentiate between the two. It arrives at an important moment for reading teachers and education leaders nationwide. have passed “science of reading” laws in recent years, most requiring districts to use curricula that have been vetted and approved by their state education departments. While existing tools can be used to assess whether a curriculum covers essential foundational skills, until now nothing has existed to help states and educators identify content richness — the other essential component of literacy.

The Knowledge Matters Review Tool looks at 26 separate criteria across eight dimensions, selected from the rich body of research on what works best in reading classrooms. That includes whether texts are intentionally organized to build topic knowledge and if classroom activities include regular communal readings of rigorous, grade-level texts. It assesses curricula based on the depth of knowledge-building discussions, a volume of reading and writing on conceptually connected texts, and the availability of targeted supports for students who need acceleration to get to grade level.

As a field, we’ve taken significant steps toward providing all students with the excellent, equitable, rigorous reading instruction they deserve. But we’re not there yet. There is real reason for hope and a clear opportunity to improve, with a rising tide of renewed focus, energy, and mandates for change. Better yet, we know more now than ever about the power of high-quality curriculum. And with this new tool, educators can be sure that curricula both meet standards and build student knowledge. If we can get this right, I believe we’re on the cusp of reshaping literacy instruction and supporting a new generation of excellent readers.

During the campaign, Searcy, a former state representative who supports school choice, touted her ability to work across the aisle. But with Republicans prevailing in other statewide races, her message apparently didn’t break through.

In the wake of recent results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — showing flat performance in Georgia since 2019, but a sharp in eighth-grade math — Woods told �鶹��Ʒ he plans to “stabilize and improve student academic performance as we move out of the pandemic” and to “bolster and support our teacher workforce.”

With Woods looking to hold onto his seat, the state education department would continue its shift away from Common Core standards, long associated with the Obama administration despite their origin in the states. Georgia is in the process of implementing new math and English language arts . Observers suggest it will also join other states in emphasizing evidence-based literacy instruction.

“I have seen some encouraging signs that literacy is emerging as a focus,” said Ken Zeff, executive director of Learn4Life, a nonprofit working to improve education in the metro Atlanta area. “That could help reverse not just the latest NAEP results, but generations of students struggling with literacy.”

During the campaign, Woods emphasized his efforts to reduce testing and teacher evaluation visits. He said Searcy’s lack of experience as a classroom teacher made her unprepared to lead the education department. 

Searcy criticized Woods’s support for a state law restricting how teachers can discuss some , which she said ties teachers’ hands and undermines their professionalism.

A charter schools supporter, Searcy served as superintendent of a small, all-girls charter network before leaving to work as an educational consultant. Her advocacy for school choice, however, lost her the endorsement of the Georgia Association of Educators, the state affiliate of the National Education Association.

The race was largely overshadowed by other high-profile match-ups on the ballot, namely former football star Herschel Walker’s bid to oust Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams’s second attempt to defeat Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. Kemp was re-elected with almost 54% of the vote, but the Walker/Warnock race is still too close to call.

The test, administered in schools biannually since 1969, had shown only lackluster academic growth in most states for over a decade. The latest scores suggested more of the same, with meaningful declines in fourth- and eighth-grade English. Peggy Carr, then the associate director of the National Center for Education Statistics, observed that improvement was so meager that “students who are struggling the most at reading…are where they were nearly 30 years ago.”

There was a somewhat startling upside, though. Two jurisdictions, Washington, D.C., and Mississippi, attained some of the highest scores in the history of their participation. And while education reformers have hailed the nation’s capital for innovation, with generous per-pupil funding to match, Mississippi’s historically dismal achievement and gnawing racial achievement gaps were long the target . 

But the 2019 results put an end to the snickers. Through the 2010s, when national data offered only rare bright spots amid prolonged stagnation, Mississippi fourth graders charged from the back of the pack to the national average in both math and reading. While eighth graders enjoyed more modest success, their recent gains in math were among the largest of any state. And best of all, the prosperity was shared: Black and Hispanic students, including those from low-income families, alongside their white and middle-class peers.

Carey Wright, Mississippi’s superintendent of schools since 2013, had already seen student performance climb on state assessments for multiple years. Still, her advisors cautioned her to wait for confirmation from NAEP, a nationally representative exam with a high benchmark for proficiency. When that evidence finally came, she said, people in the state were “blown away.”

“It was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God — that’s so fantastic! And this is Mississippi!’�ĝ&�Բ�����;

The transformation of one of America’s poorest and least-educated states into a fast-rising powerhouse took most outsiders by surprise. In reality, Mississippi’s emergence in 2019 resulted from a generation of groundwork in both schools and state government, with incremental gains coming along the way. Under Wright’s supervision, the Mississippi Department of Education introduced massive changes to instruction and adopted rigorous new learning standards. State lawmakers pushed through a raft of new education bills, including a controversial mandate to hold back third graders who cannot read on grade level. And now, with the COVID era receding and Wright set to retire at the end of this month, bigger and richer states are looking to Mississippi as a model.

“It’s not that they changed their test some year or played some game that made their scores look better. We’ve seen a lot of that kind of thing, and I’ve learned to be super-skeptical,” said Timothy Shanahan, an internationally recognized expert on reading and an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “When you get these kinds of gains over this period of time, something real must be going on.”

Rachel Canter, a former teacher who founded the advocacy group in 2008, said that the state’s remarkable success is partially attributable to its of reading pedagogy. But hard-won improvement has mostly come from accepting hard truths and embracing accountability, she added.

“If you go back 20 years and look at what our state required children to know and be able to do, it was practically meaningless. Over a 20-year-period, we have gone through — in fits and starts — periods of improving our standards; improving our assessments to measure those standards; and then saying, ‘OK, still not good enough.’” 

‘An abysmal failure’

Canter began her career in education in 2004 as a Teach for America corps member in the Mississippi Delta. A native Mississippian who grew up in the relatively well-off college town of Starkville, she was shocked by the level of deprivation in her host community, where are poor and African-American. 

The signs of failure were everywhere: dilapidated desks handed down since the 1950s, a chaotic “activity schedule” that frequently preempted math courses, and despairing attitudes among some teachers toward even the possibility of improvement. Canter, a middle school English teacher, frequently taught students who couldn’t read.  

“They were functionally a second or third grader, but they could float along and end up in seventh grade,” she remembered. “And it’s like, ‘You’re now three to four years behind. What do you do in a single year?’ That was what made me realize that I couldn’t solve this problem as a classroom teacher.” 

At that time, perhaps the loudest voice in Mississippi’s advocacy and policy environment belonged to the Barksdale Reading Institute, founded in 2000 with the aim of gradually lifting the state’s reading performance through strategic partnerships with K-12 schools and colleges. One of its first moves was to pay for a dozen faculty members to introduce evidence-based literacy practices in Mississippi’s eight public teacher training programs. 

But the intractability of the problem was revealed in a 2003 report written by Kelly Butler, a former classroom teacher: teaching candidates in pre-literacy courses received an average of about 20 minutes of total phonics instruction. The finding was particularly galling given the of experts that children in early grades be exposed to phonics as a critical building block for reading.

“It was an abysmal failure because we had no impact on teacher preparation,” lamented Butler, who now serves as the institute’s CEO. “Faculty didn’t know the science. One of the findings was that they really didn’t influence each other. And there was no requirement of what they had to teach.”

The scattered focus on teacher preparation matched Mississippi’s infamously weak approach to setting academic expectations. In a 2007 study of comparative learning standards across 48 states, Mississippi’s were ranked , such that a “proficient” reading score on its statewide exam in Massachusetts. 

In response to persistent criticism, Mississippi joined 45 other states in adopting the Common Core State Standards in 2010. By this time, partly in response to Barksdale’s report, the state licensing board also required pre-service teachers to complete six hours of courses on the science of reading. But the state’s education system hadn’t overcome its reputation for shoddiness — well-known not just in policy circles, but also the business community. Young workers’ lack of skills had become a major liability in Mississippi’s ongoing campaign to attract jobs. 

“[Employers] are drawn to places where there was good education and an educated workforce,” said Phil Bryant, Mississippi’s governor from 2012 to 2020. “And they would verbalize that to me: ‘We won’t come to Mississippi unless you do a better job of educating the workforce.’”

Political shift

After years of somewhat meandering progress, it was a political shift that changed the game in Mississippi. 

A in the 2011 round of legislative elections gave the GOP control over the state House of Representatives. Bryant won office the same day, making him Mississippi’s first Republican governor to enjoy unified control over government in nearly 150 years. According to Canter — who, by this point, was formally lobbying legislators as the head of Mississippi First — the consequence was less an ideological shift than a collection of “new faces in these positions of power.” 

“That opened the door to…conversations that nobody had really been having before, because these were people who were looking to make their name on something and say, ‘This is my issue,’” she said.

The 2013 legislative session would be perhaps the most consequential in the history of Mississippi schools. A landmark bill was passed . So was a set of voluntary pre-kindergarten programs for 3- and 4-year olds (previously, Mississippi was the not to finance pre-K). 

But the most ambitious new measure was the , a sweeping new statute that required third graders to score above the lowest level on an annual exam — the so-called “reading gate” assessment — in order to progress to the fourth grade. 

The requirement generated controversy when it came into effect in 2015, with one parent group pushing to and of kids crying or becoming sick over stress from the test. Even the Barksdale Institute’s Butler, who backed the law’s other measures — such as improved professional development offerings and the placement of expert literacy coaches in struggling schools — originally opposed the retention policy, fearing that accountability would predominantly fall “on the backs of 9-year-olds.” With time, however, she came to favor its application as a “wake-up call” for adults.

“Everyone said, ‘You know you’re going to hold thousands of children back,’” recalled then-Gov. Bryant. “Well, whose fault is that? It’s ours. Our job is to create a safe learning environment where they can read, and if we don’t do that, it’s our fault.”

Erica Jones, a former first- and second-grade teacher who now leads the Mississippi Association of Educators, said that the increased state guidance on reading instruction began to be apparent about a decade ago. 

In the early 2000s, when Jones began teaching, it seemed “as if many of the different school districts were just kind of picking programs that they wanted to implement,” Jones said. “But around 2010, I noticed that the state was giving us a lot of direction on which way we should go with reading instruction, and that really seemed to pull us together.” 

Butler added that the staunchly prescriptive approach taken by state education authorities in 2013 flew in the face of local control. Superintendents could sometimes “resent” the presence of state-mandated coaches in their district, along with the need to periodically employ substitutes while their English teachers received necessary training.

In most instances, Butler observed, “People say, ‘We want to choose our own professional development, and we want to decide when we do it and who gets it. The Literacy-Based Promotion Act essentially said, ‘Here’s who’s gonna get it.’ And the state department…said, ‘And here’s what you’re gonna get.'”

‘Bottom line’ on standards

But whatever momentum had built up behind school reform, repeated shakeups to the education system were never going to sit easily with voters — particularly the conservatives who had backed Bryant in 2011. 

The national pushback against Common Core, depicted by its mostly Republican detractors as and a tool of ideological , swept into Mississippi in 2014. It landed on the desk of Wright, a former high-level administrator in Maryland and Washington, D.C., who was appointed state superintendent the previous year. Practically from the moment she took the job, she had to navigate a treacherous debate around the newly controversial initiative. 

As teachers and school leaders sought to implement the standards, various members of Mississippi’s governing class sought (and ) to scrap them. The years-long imbroglio eventually proceeded to the same resolution that many red states engineered: a rebrand, dumping the blighted “Common Core” title while only subtly tweaking its substance. But as that process played out, Bryant noted that his schools chief had a gift — uncommon in both politicians and bureaucrats — for disarming hostile audiences.

“She would go on conservative talk radio and spend an hour breaking down the standards, describing each one of them,” he remembered. “You just don’t get a lot of education secretaries who say, ‘I’ll go on with the most conservative talk show host because I feel comfortable explaining this.’ But Carey Wright did it.”

Notwithstanding other major priorities, the superintendent said that maintaining rigor in academic standards was her “bottom line.”

“The standards we had before had been evaluated by two outside organizations — one using the term ‘worst in the nation,’ and the other using the word ‘horrific,’” Wright said. “I have every confidence in children in this state that they can reach those standards, but we had to set higher expectations.”

Efforts to move away from the new policy, now called the Mississippi College- and Career-Readiness Standards, died down by the end of Bryant’s term. But some public distaste still exists around the policy of literacy-based retention, particularly after Wright lifted the required score to pass the “reading gate” test in 2018. The next year, roughly one-quarter of the state’s third graders . 

Superintendent Cherie Labat is the head of schools in Columbus, a mid-sized city near the border with Alabama; in 2019, almost 40 percent of third graders in her district after their first crack at the test. While generally supportive of the academic progress in recent years, she reflected that the pain felt by families as a result of the reading law “would give any educator pause.”

“I had a parent come up to me at Walgreens and say, ‘I read to my child. I do homework with her two or three times a week. I send her to school, and she has decent grades,’” the superintendent said. “And then she says, ‘Dr. Labat, am I a good mother? Because my daughter didn’t pass the reading gate.’ I think I’ve never forgotten that.”

A ‘gratifying’ foundation

Happily, recent results from the literacy exam have also given the state perhaps its best news since 2019. In May, the Mississippi Department of Education reported that passed the reading gate on their first try this year, nearly identical to the rate measured just before the pandemic. 

The announcement occasioned jubilation locally as evidence that COVID’s tremendous disruption to K-12 coursework had not derailed the state’s long path to better performance. It could also serve as a valediction for the schools regime now passing from the stage. After an unusually long tenure in office, on June 30. Last week, the Barksdale Reading Initiative that its founders would soon close its doors after mostly realizing their original goals. Bryant left office two years ago. 

Changes to policy are still moving forward, with the legislature signing a huge teacher pay raise in April and bolstering in early childhood education. But Labat argued that still more needed to be done for the dozens of school districts across the state that educate severely disadvantaged children. One report last year showed that, while lawmakers in Jackson have continually funded the K-12 priorities they created, Mississippi than each of its nearest Southern neighbors. 

“We have digital technology coaches, we have literacy coaches, we have phonics-first training,” she said. “But overall, we have to look at the bigger picture, the whole child, to understand that Mississippi can’t be defined by its reading scores. We will be judged as a state by how effectively we have educated our underserved students and how we work to promote the least among us.”

Trends statewide appear positive as Wright prepares to hand off her duties; preliminary data from this year’s round of state assessments suggests a strong COVID bounce-back, she revealed. In the meantime, education leaders from around the country are closely studying for teacher preparation and citing the Mississippi example for K-12 improvement.

“To know that the foundation has been laid in Mississippi is very, very gratifying,” Wright said.

The scores offer more discouraging evidence from NAEP, often referred to as “the Nation’s Report Card.” Various iterations of the exam, each tracking different subjects and age groups over several years, have now shown flat or falling numbers. 

The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring. In a Wednesday media call, NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr told reporters that 13-year-olds had never before seen declines on the assessment, and the results were so startling that she had her staff double-check the results.

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“I asked them to go back and check because I wanted to be sure,” Carr recalled. “I’ve been reporting these results for…decades, and I’ve never reported a decline like this.”

The eight-year gap between 2020’s exam and its predecessor, in 2012, is the longest interval that has ever passed between successive rounds of the long-term trend assessment; a round that was originally scheduled for 2016 was for budgetary reasons. Given the length of time between exams and the general trend of increasing scores over multiple decades, observers could have expected to see at least some upward movement.

Instead, both reading and math results for nine-year-olds have made no headway; scores were flat for every ethnic and gender subgroup of younger children — with the exception of nine-year-old girls, who scored five points worse on math than they had in 2012. Their dip in performance produced a gender gap for the age group that did not exist on the test’s last iteration.

More ominous were the results for 13-year-olds, who experienced statistically significant drops of three and five points in reading and math, respectively. Compared with math performance in 2012, boys overall lost five points, and girls overall lost six points. Black students dropped eight points and Hispanic students four points; both decreases widened their score gap with white students, whose scores were statistically unchanged from 2012.

In keeping with previous NAEP releases, the scores also showed significant drops in performance among low-performing test-takers. Most disturbing: Declines among 13-year-olds scoring at the 10th percentile of reading mean that the group’s literacy performance is not significantly improved compared with 1971, when the test was first administered. In all other age/subject configurations, students placing at all levels of the achievement spectrum have gained ground over the last half-century.

“It’s really a matter for national concern, this high percentage of students who are not reaching even what I think we’d consider the lowest levels of proficiency,” said George Bohrnstedt, a senior vice president and institute fellow at the American Institutes for Research.  

Tom Loveless, an education researcher and former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said that the reversals in math performance were particularly disappointing because they defied NAEP’s recent trends. For roughly the last three decades, even as politicians and education policy mavens have emphasized literacy instruction, comparatively rapid growth in math scores have made that subject “the star of the show,” Loveless said. 

“Now it almost appears as if those gains are now unwinding, they’re going away. And I don’t think anyone has been able to identify why that’s happening.” 

Bohrnstedt who has followed NAEP for much of his career, said the declines in 13-year-old math performance was notable for another reason: The long-term trends assessment, which been administered by NCES for a half-century, differs substantively from from the content found on other versions of the test. Reflecting the way math was taught in the 1970s, the assessment features more naked math problems and less complex problem-solving than the so-called “main NAEP,” which is administered to fourth- and eighth-graders every two years.

“For the most part, it’s a more basic kind of math than is being taught today, so it’s disappointing to see that we’re still seeing this poor performance by large percentages of our children,” Bohrnstedt said.

Overall, Loveless said, the combination of flat scores on the biennial “main NAEP” and significant declines on this version of the test indicates that American math instruction changed direction over the last decade in a way that may have stymied learning. While hesitating to blame the Common Core curricular reforms that spread during the Obama administration — he recently wrote on the oft-maligned learning standards — Loveless called for further research to investigate possible causes.

“To me, it suggests that beginning a decade or so ago, something went wrong with how we teach math to younger students,” he said. “My own hypothesis is that an emphasis on conceptual understanding has gone too far, that without computational skills to anchor math concepts, students get lost.”

Michael Petrilli, head of the reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a defender of the Common Core standards, said that the results could reflect an alternative theory: That the social and financial overhang of the Great Recession profoundly disrupted skills formation for children who are now reaching their teen years. 

“Assuming that Common Core wasn’t implemented until about 2013, the 13-year-olds wouldn’t have been exposed to it until about second grade,” Petrilli wrote in an email. “The nine-year-olds, on the other hand, got it from kindergarten. So why are the 9 year olds holding steady?”

‘Very Discouraging’

Perhaps the most striking revelation from the release is the continued divergence in scores between students at the top and bottom of the performance distribution — a phenomenon that Commissioner Carr called “well-established” during Wednesday’s media session. 

Throughout all four age and subject configurations, when average scores for most students were stagnant, scores for the lowest-performing students were down; when scores for most students were down, scores for the lowest-performing plummeted.

In nine-year-old reading, where average scores remained unchanged from 2012 — and scores for the top-performing students ticked up a point — those for students scoring at the 10th percentile fell seven points. The same students lost six points in math, while 13-year-olds scoring at the 10th percentile dropped five points in reading and an astonishing 12 points in math.

Even comparatively low-performers at higher levels lost ground in some respects. Nine-year-olds marked at the 25th percentile dropped four points in math, while 13-year-olds at the 25th and 50th percentiles lost eight and five points, respectively, in the subject. 

“It’s very discouraging to see this steep drop at the 10th percentile in both reading and mathematics, but especially in mathematics,” Bohrnstedt concluded. “It also confirms what we’ve seen with respect to the high percentage of kids performing at the ‘below basic’ level in the main NAEP.” 

The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19. Loveless said he hoped future analyses of how kids learned during and after the greatest disaster in K-12 history wouldn’t overlook the “deeper,” persistent stagnation that preceded it.

“These scores represent the last valid, national assessment of student achievement pre-pandemic. For that reason, they will take on historical significance as a baseline measure when future analysts attempt to gauge the impact of the pandemic on student learning.”

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A little more than a decade after the fight over the standards began, the vast majority of U.S. students still learn from curricula that are at least nominally aligned with Common Core. But a wave of research released over the last few years suggests that, far from being either a K-12 panacea or a domineering exercise in Washington overreach, the huge shift in policy had a relatively meager impact on student achievement, and may not have altered teacher practices nearly as much as was originally thought.

The latest data point comes from published in the open-access journal of the American Education Research Association. Analyzing standardized test performance from states that adopted and implemented Common Core early on, researcher Joshua Bleiberg found that scores ticked up only modestly over the first few years. The improvement was limited to scores in math, and even that was enjoyed disproportionately by relatively well-off children.

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Bleiberg, a research associate at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, said that his findings pointed to the same general picture of Common Core that earlier research has yielded: an idea that failed to live up to expectations.

“There are now a few studies, including mine, that find small effects for math or ELA, whether they’re positive or negative,” he said. “I think a lot of people have accurately characterized that as a policy failure. That was not the objective, and the effect sizes were so small.”

To examine the changes triggered by Common Core, Bleiberg compared fourth- and eighth-grade scores on math and reading over six iterations of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. The last two rounds of the exam came in 2011 and 2013, when the standards were beginning to be enacted. Altogether, he assembled data from hundreds of thousands of students across roughly 4,000 schools.

While the majority of states had begun on the road to Common Core by 2013, only some were “early adopters” that had already established new professional development and curriculum standards, or officially mandated that instruction had to be aligned with Common Core. (Fourteen states were excluded from the research entirely, either because they never adopted Common Core or they had comparatively rigorous academic standards in place even before its arrival on the scene.) By exploiting the differences in timing, Bleiberg set out to isolate the effects that could be plausibly attributed to the new standards.

Those effects were hardly transformative — only 10 percent of a standard deviation in NAEP math results. Using eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch as a stand-in for poverty, the growth in scores was greater for economically advantaged white students — and much more significant for economically advantaged African American fourth-graders — than their less affluent peers.

The conclusions are similar to those of other studies that have probed Common Core’s impact on learning, which have generally shown achievement either unchanged, rising very slightly, or even sinking somewhat. Tom Loveless, a former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, conducted several of those studies and recently published . In an interview, he described the general findings on Common Core’s early returns as simply disappointing.

“There’s no other way to say it, especially over many, many years of implementation, all the money that was spent on it, all the teacher development, and the debate that got so bitter and nutty,” Loveless said. “What a distraction, to get us so fired up over one-tenth of a standard deviation. It’s just minuscule.”

The heart of the reform’s “failure” lay in its theory of action, he argued. Even ambitious regulatory changes must penetrate multiple layers of authority before eventually reaching classrooms. In the case of Common Core, the federal government had to induce states to rewrite their standards of learning, states themselves had to prepare their districts to implement them, and districts had to bring along schools and employees. That tortuous chain of custody, which Loveless analogized to the children’s game of telephone, makes it challenging to ensure that the designers’ original intentions are ever carried out.

“I don’t even think a school principal can do that in his or her own building with a teacher who has low standards,” Loveless said. “So the idea that we’re going to have this broad-scaled, top-down implementation of standards in a way that improves learning — that just doesn’t work.”

Though the standards don’t appear to have significantly raised the bar for student performance over their first decade, Bleiberg said there was little reason to think that anything might be gained by abandoning them now. But it remained an open question, he said, to what extent the huge expenditure of money, time, and political capital had succeeded in altering instruction. In fact, conducted by the RAND Corporation suggested that by 2016 — well into Common Core’s implementation phase — most teachers still weren’t using curricular materials that were highly aligned to the new standards.

The inability of authorities to persuade teachers to buy into the approach may have spelled disappointment from the start, Bleiberg observed.

“States can’t direct, really, what teachers think, and so teachers will correctly use their judgment in their own classrooms. This is a reform that’s particularly sensitive to those types of challenges, and I think the people in 2007-2009 who were thinking about it perhaps didn’t adequately take that into account, and that’s why it didn’t work as well as they thought it would.”

Whatever happened to Common Core?

That’s the question that veteran education researcher Tom Loveless asks in the final chapter of , Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core. Released this spring by Harvard Education Press, the slim volume examines the debate around the ambitious reform and the inherent limits of trying to improve education systems through regulatory means.

To the regret of its (often very vocal) detractors, nothing much seems to have happened to Common Core; even after a furious political battle in the late Obama years, most states still have some version of the controversial academic standards on the books. States attempting to replace them with new learning frameworks were often engaged in than a substantive overhaul, and once a few years had passed, politicians moved on to new skirmishes in the education culture wars.

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But a decade after they were first adopted by states, little evidence exists to show that teaching or learning was significantly improved by the vast resources poured into implementing the standards. At least one study has found students in states that were early adopters of Common Core scored slightly lower on both the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s reading and math portions. If the point of spending billions of dollars to establish the mammoth set of new learning guidelines was to make sure kids became “college- and career-ready” (to use a term that was ubiquitous around 2013), not much progress seems to have been made toward that goal.

A former sixth-grade teacher, Harvard professor, and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Loveless has watched the development of academic standards for decades, ultimately concluding that they are an ineffective tool to improve K-12 education. As he argued to �鶹��Ʒ’s Kevin Mahnken, regulatory reforms like Common Core are riven with utopian expectations and unlikely to change what actually goes on in classrooms.

“The problem is inherent to top-down efforts at controlling curriculum and instruction,” Loveless writes in the book. “This is not a problem that another set of standards can solve. If standards came out tomorrow, and I agreed with every single word in them, I would still give them only a slim chance of being faithfully implemented — and less than that of moving the needle on student achievement.”

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Kevin Mahnken: Your book focuses deeply on the shortcomings of academic standards. But as a reporter, the impression I’ve developed has been that K-12 education has really been driven over the last few decades by testing and accountability reforms like No Child Left Behind. Do you think people underestimate the importance of standards — not just Common Core, but also the state based standards that preceded it?

Tom Loveless: The accountability movement of the ’90s was all based on standards. There was no state in my memory that went out and created an accountability system where the accountability was based on something other than standards. They all had tests, which were written on a grade-level basis to conform with the standards those states had adopted. So it’s hard to untangle accountability from the question of standards.

In the book, I took a much longer historical perspective. I go back over 100 years to look at standards as a regulatory tool: You’ve got upper-level officials who are trying to influence what schools do with kids in terms of what they teach. That’s been going on forever, and always with limited success. It’s hard for the top of the system to have a large impact on what happens at the bottom of the system.”

That sounds right in terms of the different levers of school reform — tests are based on standards, grad schools prepare future educators to teach to those standards, etc. So they’re at the center of things.

Right, but there’s a nuance there: Those early accountability systems were not about making sure teachers followed the standards; they made sure that teachers and schools produced scores on tests that were aligned to the standards. That’s actually a completely different thing. It was test-based accountability, and there’s a separate literature on that that’s fairly positive. If you hold schools accountable for scoring on a test, and have either rewards or sanctions, you can raise those test scores. There are three or four well-designed studies that show that.

But that’s a whole different issue from what Common Core was about. If you go back and read all the Common Core documents, those standards don’t touch the accountability question at all. And as a matter of fact, the accountability systems post-Common Core — some of the Common Core authors suspect this is why Common Core had little impact — withered away. We have very soft accountability today compared with NCLB, which kind of poisoned the waters for accountability because of the way it was designed.

Do you think the basic proposition of standards-based reform — i.e., that some students just weren’t being held to high standards — was valid? It sounds like you’re saying that rigorous academic expectations aren’t enough on their own to improve K-12 education, but are they a necessary ingredient?

Yes, some states did have standards that were too low. Some districts, some schools, some teachers had standards that were too low. But the question is, can you then force states with low standards to have high standards, and will that have a positive impact? I don’t think you can.

There was a lot of research in the ’90s and the ’00s: Mississippi or some other state had terrible standards, and lots of kids were scoring proficient, but on NAEP, they never even got close [to proficiency]. So obviously the state has much lower standards than what you’d want. But the people in Mississippi read the newspaper; they know their NAEP scores. And where’s the political pressure from the state, from the bottom up, to fix that? Now, in a lot of places, there was that pressure. But if it’s not there, can you come in from some supra-state level and force higher standards onto a state that they implement with fidelity, and eventually believe in? Because if they don’t, you’re probably not going to get very much.

Now take that same argument and just swap out the actors: Can a state come in and do the same thing to a reluctant district? Can a district come in and do it with a reluctant school? See, I don’t even think a school principal can do that in his own building with a teacher who has low standards. So the idea that we’re going to have this broad-scaled, top-down implementation of standards in a way that improves learning — that’s the thing I’m skeptical of. It’s just never worked, and it didn’t work with Common Core. So the whole approach is flawed.

The most recent evidence I’ve seen about the impact of Common Core on academic achievement comes from Joshua Bleiberg’s study in AERA Open, which found a pretty modest boost to NAEP math scores. Is that typical of the research findings thus far, and do we have reason to think that the reform’s effects could grow with time?

I consider the Bleiberg effect, a positive effect of about .1 standard deviations, to be the upper bound of what the different studies show. The , which I spend more time with in the book, shows a .1 [standard deviation] decrease, which is kind of the lower bound, and all of my own studies fall in between those two boundaries. The probable real effect of Common Core — although I’m not that confident in any of these studies, including my own — is probably somewhere within that range. And that is disappointing, there’s no other way to say it. Especially over many, many years of implementation, all the money that was spent on it, all the teacher development, and the debate that got so bitter and nutty. What a distraction to get us so fired up over one-tenth of a standard deviation. It’s just miniscule.

There’s one thing in the study that gets at the question: “What if we just stuck with this thing? Maybe there are great things that are going to happen just over the horizon.” If you read Bleiberg’s analysis, most of the effect kicks in after the first two years. It’s not going up; if anything, it’s petering out. The C-SAIL study found that the effect was not only negative, but that it was getting more negative over time. So even though those two studies have different signs in front of the effect — one’s positive, one’s negative — they really kind of find the same thing: The most positive impact was very early in the process of implementing Common Core. To me, that makes total sense because all the professional development, the initial billions of dollars, was all spent in the first few years to get this thing off the ground. I don’t know any study of professional development that says, ‘Oh, wait a decade, and then really good things kick in.’ It just doesn’t work that way.

You mentioned that you’re not totally sure about the findings in these studies, including your own. What are the challenges in measuring effects from reforms like Common Core?

In my work, I don’t even make a causal claim because there are too many impediments to do that.

Both Bleiberg and the C-SAIL study used an interrupted time series design. In order to do that, you need to have a very clear break period: Here’s when this thing didn’t exist, and then on this day, it existed. There are studies that use that design very effectively — for instance, a Josh Angrist study of [the effects of] lowering the age at which people can buy alcohol, which was a big issue in the ’70s. A lot of states lowered their legal drinking age from 21 to 18, and those laws went into effect at midnight on January 1. So suddenly, the bars were filled with 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds, whereas before, they couldn’t get in. There was a clear cut-point in the state’s actions that could be measured in terms of pre and post. Academic standards just don’t work that way.

A few different researchers studying Common Core, including myself, ended up going about it in the same way. Virtually all the states in the country adopted Common Core, and you had to sort them: one group that really did Common Core, another group that sort of adopted it and did a half-baked approach, and then the five states that just rejected Common Core. Those were the three groups whose NAEP scores I tried to measure over time. Pretty much all of my analysis showed the same thing, which was very little effect.

Another problem was that the natural comparison group is the five states that rejected Common Core from the beginning: Texas, Virginia, Nebraska, Alaska, and Minnesota in math — they kept their existing math standards but adopted the ELA standards. But each of those states, if you go back and read the standards they did adopt, they’re not terribly different from Common Core. And it’s not as if Common Core was revolutionary; it wasn’t the first set of standards that said, ‘You know, we should teach kids fractions!’ I would argue that Common Core has 80-90 percent overlap with the previous standards that a lot of states had.

So that invites the notion of just what the change was. Of course, the Common Core people would say, ‘It led to better curriculum, better instruction, better tests,’ and again, there’s no evidence of that. Anyway, that’s just a taste of some of the methodological constraints on measuring this.

Is the main problem here that states and districts didn’t implement Common Core well? Or is it just asking too much of academic standards to expect them to really improve teaching and learning? It seems like Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California who also wrote for Harvard, feels that . 

I just did on [American Enterprise Institute scholar] Nat Malkus’s podcast. He started with that question: Is it a problem of implementation, or a problem with the theory of action? Morgan and I both said that the theory itself is flawed. We can’t engineer our way to better standards.

Again, standards are a regulatory tool, and we’re not going to be able to simply regulate better K-12 learning. It’s not going to work that way. Just to give an example — and this isn’t necessarily bad or good implementation, it’s just what happens — when you ask some teachers or district people what the main tenets of Common Core mathematics are, they’ll say, ‘Well, kids need to be working in groups.’ And then they’ll list a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with Common Core, which does not mandate that kids work in groups. It doesn’t even talk about that! It was like NCLB in that if you asked people what it meant, you’d get different answers in different places.

Not long ago, I wrote an article about the press coverage of Common Core and its implementation. Within a couple of years of Common Core’s adoption, you’d have journalists attending these workshops where professional development was being given. And in a particular math workshop, the developer was saying all the stuff I just mentioned: “You need to put your kids in groups, you need to be using manipulatives, you need to deemphasize procedures and rote learning, you need to emphasize conceptual understanding.” Now, Common Core does shoulder some guilt on the conceptual understanding thing, but it doesn’t say you should deemphasize anything.

The point is that, everywhere across the country, we have educators who have belief systems of their own. And if they believe in putting kids in groups, or believe in what we used to call ‘progressive education,’ or student-centered instructional practices, they’re going to interpret any policy coming down the line to promote those things; they’re going to read the documents through that lens. It’s not a heartfelt effort to distort, and these people aren’t sinister. It’s just how they read things. So you’re going to get actual implementation that’s different from what’s on paper, like the old children’s game of telephone where things sound different at the end of the line. That’s not corrupt intent, it’s that you have so many people sifting through these things as they make their way down the system.

It sounds like if you want to really change instruction through academic standards, you’d have to be so prescriptive just to avoid people doing something totally unrelated to what you want. 

And besides that, standards tend to be utopian. They tend to be aspirational, wishful thinking, and Common Core is a clear example of that. Common Core used this phrase, “college- and career-ready,” and then mapped standards back from the twelfth grade. But nobody yet has defined “career-ready” in such a way that doesn’t really just mean “college-ready.” At least, I haven’t seen any good definition of career readiness come out of these standards movements. So you can just delete the word “career,” and essentially what these standards are saying is, “Everybody, 100 percent, will be ready for college by the end of high school.” That’s very much like NCLB’s 100 percent proficiency goal. So what did the test makers, both PARCC and Smarter Balanced, do? They adopted NAEP proficiency as their standard.

The last batch of data I saw from the states that still use Smarter Balanced showed that 32 percent of eleventh-graders pass in math, and 68 percent fall below the threshold indicating readiness. If Common Core were working at all — and if we should have faith in this test to measure a goal that we could actually achieve — we’d be doing better than 32 percent. I mean, are you going to deny a diploma to two-thirds of the kids because they fail math? Politically, it’s a non-starter.

A lot of the reformers point to high-achieving countries like Singapore and South Korea, but if you map international assessments like TIMSS and PISA onto NAEP proficiency, it shows that at least 25 percent of their populations would fail. And these are the highest-achieving countries on the planet. So the goals are ones that no society has ever attained, and it’s not going to happen.

You’ve also written previously about the fact that NAEP proficiency levels might just be set too high. The NCES commissioner basically said as much in of the National Assessments Governing Board.

It turns our national test, which should be something that gives real information, into a kind of disinformation. It makes it like one of those late-night cable ads: “You can look like this if you just buy cans of this stuff and drink it five times a day!” It doesn’t work, it winds up undermining the validity, and I think Common Core suffers from it all. If you look at the outcomes by the end of high school, they’re much more than ambitious; they’re unrealistic.