Dumbing down?

A new report by the Pioneer Institute, “Why Race to the Middle?,” offers a disturbing look at the effort to establish national education standards that states will be required to adopt if they want to share in federal Race to the Top funds.

Dumbing down?

Move toward ed standards has problems

A new report by the Pioneer Institute, “Why Race to the Middle?,” offers a disturbing look at the effort to establish national education standards that states will be required to adopt if they want to share in federal Race to the Top funds. The report details how a lack of public input, poor writing, misconceptions and outright errors have plagued the work of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

The report warns that CCSSI’s college and career-readiness standards are set “far below the admission requirements of almost all state colleges and universities in this country,” and could result in states such as Massachusetts, Indiana and California, which currently are national models for excellence, lowering the bar of expectations.

Among the paper’s findings:

•“Evidence” backing CCSSI’s work is not from peer-reviewed research journals, but consists mainly of surveys “conducted by the testing companies that stand most immediately to gain from the testing of those standards.”

•The K-12 standards demand mastery of fewer concepts in mathematics than leading states already require of their students; moreover, some of the concepts included in the math standards contain unclear language or incorrect definitions.

•Many of the people involved in writing the standards for CCSSI appear to have little, if any, actual classroom experience in K-12 schools.

The paper presents a serious indictment of the work to date on developing national standards, including the remarkable fact that states are being asked — as a condition of obtaining federal funds — to sign on to standards that are both incomplete and demonstrably subpar.

Given that current law constrains the U.S. Department of Education from issuing a set of national standards per se, the work of the CCSSI coalition could be a valuable start toward offering states some broad benchmarks to improve the quality of instruction nationwide. The Pioneer report makes clear, however, that such work must be conducted with broad public input and drafted by those with “relevant academic credentials.”

We concur with Pioneer’s assessment that rushing toward a single set of standards for all is ill-advised. Such work must be done much more deliberately, so as not to jeopardize progress to date.

Thus far, the work of the CCSSI coalition is simply not up to grade level.

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