Effects of College-and Career-Ready Standards on Student Achievement: Significant negative effects for grade 4 reading; Negative effects were also observed for grade 8 reading, grade 4 math, and grade 8 math

Full report

 

Since the release of the report A Nation at Risk, standards-based reforms have been a crucial part of federal and state efforts to improve education. College- and career-ready (CCR) standards--the focus of the current wave of standards-based reform—differ from states’ previous standards in importantways.Most notably,the new CCR standards were explicitly designed around thegoal of ensuring college and career readiness for all studentsupon high school graduation. 

This explicit focus on college and career readiness in the CCRstandards stemmed fromthe concern thattoomany students do not have the knowledge and skills needed for success in college and the workplace. Nearly half of new college students, for example,had to take remedial courses (Based on the estimates from the National Center for Education Statistics (2010), for example, 40 percent of 2003–04 high school seniors who had enrolled in college by 2006 and 51 percent of the entering students in public 2-year institutions took remedial courses) and surveys of employers also showed widespread dissatisfaction with the literacy and mathematicsskills of young job applicants(U.S. Department of Education, 2010). 

In addition to high college-remediation rates, another impetus for the current wave of standards-based reform was the recognition that the rigor of states’ standards varied widely across states and declined in many states as an unintended consequence of the accountability requirements under the No Child Left BehindAct of 2001(Bandeira de Mello, Blankenship, &McLaughlin, 2009).

To encourage states to adopt more rigorousstandards, the Obama administration built into its $4.35billion Race To the Top grant program the requirement that states applying for the grant need to demonstrate their commitment to adopting rigorous CCRstandards. Specifically, states were required to participate in a consortium consisting of a significant number of states working toward jointly developing and adopting a common set of K-12 standards that “are internally benchmarked and build toward college and career readiness by the time of high school graduation” (U.S.Department of Education, 2009, p.7). 

Spearheaded by the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the CCSS Initiative was launched in 2009 and aimed to develop a common set of ELA and mathematics standards for all states, based on evidence of what knowledge and skills are needed to be ready for college and career upon high school graduation, and internationally benchmarked to the world’s highest-performing countries.

Released in June 2010, the CCSS was quickly adopted by 45 states and DCby the end of 2011, and adopted by one more state (Washington) in June 2012.

The extraordinary initial response of states to the CCSSS, however, was followed by a steady decline in public support.The annual EducationNext public opinion polls, for example, show that in 2012, 90% of all those taking a side indicated that they supported the CCSS, and this percentage declined steadily to 83% in 2013, 58% in 2015, and 50% in 2016 (Peterson, Herderson, West, & Barrows, 2016). By fall 2017, 11states had announced a major Common Core rewrite or replacement.

In recent years, though, public support for the CCSS has increased slightly—52% in 2017 and 54% in 2018 according to the Education Next polls. There are many reasons for the rising opposition to the CCSS. Some educators, for example,do not agree withcertain aspects of the standards themselves(e.g., the increased emphasis on non-fictional text in ELA). 

The study presented in this paper is intended to begin to fill in this gap. As part of a larger research agenda on the implementation and impact of the CCR standards, this study was designed to assess the effects of CCRstandards on student achievement. The overarching question guiding the study is as follows: Did states’ adoption of CCR standards result in increases in student achievement in reading and mathematics, both overall and for key student subgroups.

Findings

Contrary to researchers expectation, they found significant negative effects for grade 4 reading. Negative effects were also observed for grade 8 reading, grade 4 math, and grade 8 math, although none of those effects were statistically significant except for the 7-year effectfor grade 8 math.