To keep up with the demands of the new Common Core curriculum standards, teachers have made major changes to their lesson plans and the instructional materials they use. Principals aren’t getting much push-back from parents about the switch to Common Core. And the number of students reaching proficiency on the new multi-state tests was much lower than on the state tests they replaced.
Those are some of the findings of a study released this month by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. Teachers at 151 elementary and middle schools in five states across the country were surveyed last spring as their students prepared to take the new standardized tests that are aligned to the Common Core standards. Nearly 1,500 teachers and 142 principals completed the survey. Teachers in three of the states (Maryland, Massachusetts and New Mexico) administered the PARCC test and in two of the states (Delaware and Nevada) they used the Smarter Balanced consortium test.
Among the findings of “Teaching Higher: Educators’ Perspectives on Common Core Implementation”:
- Students perform better when teachers are being evaluated based on student achievement. New Mexico is the only one of the five states where students’ test scores (on the PARCC) would contribute to performance evaluation. “Critics of teacher evaluation reforms have worried that doing so leads teachers to teach to the test,” say the authors. “This is a greater concern when the assessments are measuring low-level skills. With more rigorous assessments designed to measure higher standards, such incentives may be helpful in encouraging schools to meet the new standards.”
- Principals in the five states described facing little resistance to the new standards from parents. The survey showed that 9% of principals reported “quite a bit” or “a tremendous amount” of resistance. To be sure, two-thirds said they put in some effort to win over parents.
- The higher the percentage of teachers who report being knowledgeable about Common Core, the higher the math scores.
- Students are reading more non-fiction and writing more assignments where they are expected to use evidence to support their arguments.
- When teachers get explicit feedback on the required changes in instruction, student achievement in math goes up. “Teachers will be more successful in implementing the standards if they are not simply left to make instructional changes on their own and instead get the feedback they need to change their instruction,” say the authors, adding that only about half of the teachers reported getting explicit feedback on Common Core.
The authors linked the teachers’ responses to their students’ achievement on the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests to find out if any of the efforts put forward by the schools and teachers were leading to success on the tests. One thing is clear: test scores on the Common Core-aligned tests were down significantly from what’s known as the “legacy” tests in each state.
Massachusetts declined the least in students reaching proficiency, from 57% to 49% in math and 66% to 58% in English. The authors pointed out much larger declines in the other states. The proportion of students meeting expectations in Maryland was 41 points lower in math and 43 points lower in English. In Delaware, the rates fell by 26 points in math and 15 points in English. In New Mexico, the proportion of students meeting expectations was 24 points lower in math and 27 points lower in English.
“The Common Core State Standards and the new assessments do set a higher standard, at least in the states we are studying,” the report concludes.
