In previous posts on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), I’ve written about the consequences of federal overreach, which, in itself, is a strong argument against the nationally imposed standards. Unfortunately, this argument is unconvincing for teachers, who have been led to believe these standards will give them more instructional flexibility and ultimately will help students make academic gains.

The following two quotes about CCSS reflect these widely held beliefs.

They are not a curriculum; it’s up to school districts to choose curricula that comply with the standards.
—Kathleen Porter-Magee and Sol Stern

Not exactly. Though it’s true that Common Core is just a set of standards, curriculum is informed by assessment. If the assessment is Common Core, the curriculum is Common Core. School districts buy curriculum sets (textbooks, workbooks, reading materials, etc.) that reflect the standards and prepare students for assessments. This ultimately gives teachers less instructional flexibility.

The promise of these high standards for all students is extraordinary.
—Former NEA President Dennis Van Roekel

If only. As a teacher, I would have loved to set the same high bar for ALL of my students. But the truth is, not every student has the same readiness for learning. Last year, one of my 13-year-old students scored a 30 on the ACT. Would I set the same high bar for this student and a student who had just tested at a fourth-grade reading level? No, I would differentiate instruction, meaning I would assign a project with varying degrees of difficulty and interest-based learning.

The problem is not “setting the bar high enough,” it’s the challenge of scaffolding instruction to fill in the gaps where there is missed learning. Sure, setting a high bar for every child sounds great, but without instructional flexibility, how will teachers make decisions that best suit the needs of their students?

They won’t. Even if setting a high bar for all students did increase academic achievement, there is still some debate about whether the Common Core even does that. If Missouri really wants to see students make academic gains, we should trust teachers to do their job well, and reward the ones that do.

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Coulson points out that the difficulty of replacing the education monopoly with a free market is no reason to give up. None of our country’s previous policy victories would have been achieved had people redirected their efforts to easier alternatives — such as, to take Coulson’s example, improving their local grocery stores.

So, take a look. If you want to skip right to Coulson’s remarks, they begin about 40 minutes into the program.

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But I doubt that Rothstein is much interested in these real on-the-ground gains for both white and black students. He certainly hasn’t spoken out to protect the gains against the attempts of Massachusetts’ new Democratic Governor Deval Patrick to turn back the reform agenda.

If instructional reform is such a robust course of action, compared with those frail choice programs, why does Rothstein need to speak out about it? And why can’t it build on its own success?

This is a key difference between instructional reforms imposed from above and choice reforms driven by what parents want. If parents can choose between private schools, charter schools, and traditional public schools, then the best schools will attract lots of applications and hold on to satisfied families. But if the state mandates a new curriculum, that reform is forever at the whim of the political process, no matter how successful an outside observer judges it to be.

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"The bill is a way of providing increased tax incentives for business to invest in education," said Mary Ellen Russell, deputy director of the Maryland Catholic Conference.

Stern argued that parental choice policies are too controversial; according to him, they’re just too far out to be accepted by mainstream Americans. But as the above quote makes clear, some parental choice proposals — such as tuition tax credits — are quite similar to existing policies. States provide tax incentives for all kinds of charitable and for-profit enterprises. Any tax credit or holiday means that the state gives up tax revenue, which could have gone to the public schools instead. But when officials suggest a sales tax holiday to help people buy environmentally friendly products, nobody claims that the money should go to the public schools. We accept that the state will forego tax revenue in some cases, and we just argue about which cases deserve exceptions.

It’s true that tuition tax credits haven’t been embraced everywhere immediately. They’ve come up for debate a few times in Missouri without making it into law yet. But as a long-term strategy, Stern doesn’t give them enough credit.

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Although colleagues long thought they had him pegged, he made an abrupt about-face on vouchers in the most recent issue of City Journal, the [Manhattan Institute]’s magazine, saying there was little evidence they had done much to improve public education across the country. […]

“Milwaukee’s public schools still suffer from low achievement and miserable graduation rates, with test scores flattening in recent years,” Mr. Stern wrote. “Violence and disorder throughout the system are as serious as ever. Most voucher students are still benefiting, true; but no ?Milwaukee Miracle,’ no transformation of the public schools, has taken place.”

And here is the St. Louis Public Schools’ response to a teacher’s effective math program:

"He knows what works for him. That’s not to say he doesn’t have a program that works well for his students. But he doesn’t have the research base yet to implement what he is doing on a larger scale," said William Parker, an assistant superintendent for elementary education.

In each of these cases, a small portion of students is enjoying the success of a new idea — parental choice in Milwaukee, and a curriculum in St. Louis. But there’s opposition to expanding these ideas, because they haven’t helped everyone yet. It’s true, we wouldn’t want to implement a policy or a curriculum on a wide scale if there’s no indication it works. But if it’s helped a few students — the students who were exposed to it — that’s a good reason to expand it to a few more students and see whether the strong results continue.

The only students who will benefit directly from a parental choice program are the students who get to change schools. Caroline Hoxby has shown that competition can improve public schools too, and that’s a welcome side effect, but we can’t throw out every choice program because it hasn’t transformed the public schools yet. 

Likewise, if a curriculum works in a classroom of 20 kids, you don’t throw it out because it hasn’t yet been demonstrated to work for an entire district.

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They are private, parent-funded, and they outperform the public schools,
After application of the best econometric tools.

He also mentions that education markets for after-school tutoring are thriving in the U.S.:

Just think of “Kumon” here at home or of the “Sylvan” chain.
They thrive and make a profit ’cause the ed. monopoly’s inane.

You can watch the original scene from the operetta here.

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Stern is right that it takes a long, long time to change the education system. Although parental choice supporters have been around for 50 years, it’s only recently that a few limited voucher and tax-credit programs have sprung up. That’s just the nature of entrenched monopolies. It’s hard to change them, and they don’t always improve when they first encounter competition.

Instructional reform would take a long time to implement, too. And most people would be unhappy with the results. There are big battles within individual districts about new math versus old math, and how best to teach first-grade reading. Deciding on one standard K-12 curriculum would be harder — and the stakes would be much higher. Right now, if one district adopts an ineffective curriculum, some people may be able to move out of the area. If a state or the federal government enforced a national curriculum, a bad decision would affect students everywhere in the state or the country.

We won’t get a system of parental choice overnight. We won’t have a "rich" national curriculum tomorrow, either. Given that reforming education is a long-term process, let’s go about it the right way rather than looking for quick fixes that will cause more problems.

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