Contact:
Michael McShane: Michael.McShane@aei.org, American Enterprise Institute
Robert Rothman: brothman@all4ed.org, Alliance for Excellent Education
Ashley Inman: ashley_inman@hks.harvard.edu, 707-332-1184, Education Next Communications Office

Are the States Implementing Common Core?

Two experts identify implementation challenges and offer different assessments of progress thus far.

As 45 states work on implementing Common Core State Standards, political support, infrastructure, and coherent oversight are needed to ensure the collaborative initiative’s success. In new articles now available at https://www.educationnext.org, two authors offer differing perspectives on how Common Core implementation has fared so far and what challenges should be anticipated. While Michael McShane of the American Enterprise Institute notes concerns about politics, infrastructure and costs interfering with implementation, Robert Rothman of Alliance for Excellent Education claims evidence shows that implementation is moving forward in a deliberate and positive manner.

Pointing out that Common Core implementation in 100,000 schools in 14,000 school districts in 50 states across the country is a massive undertaking, McShane maintains it is not clear who is overseeing implementation to make sure the Common Core standards do, indeed, share commonalities. The author questions whether “state-level bureaucrats, operating in a politically charged, cost-conscious environment without governing structures in place for support, [will] be able to implement a radical overhaul of what K–12 students learn.”

Conversely, Rothman expresses confidence in the states’ abilities to implement the new standards. He cites studies that find 30 states have “developed and disseminated plans for implementation; nearly all had conducted analyses comparing the common core standards to previous state standards; 29 had developed curriculum guides or materials aligned to the common core; and 18 had revised assessments to reflect the standards, while another 15 planned to do so in the 2013-14 school year.”

Implementation, claims Rothman, has been going well in Kentucky and Colorado. Kentucky, which is much further along in Common Core implementation than most other states, worked closely with teachers and “developed a regional infrastructure to provide professional development, materials, and support.” Colorado took a local-approach to implementation, choosing to “pilot implementation in 13 districts, with support from a local organization.”

Hand in hand with implementation, however, are concerns about infrastructure. The assessments designed by the two large testing consortia, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), are designed to be taken on desktops, laptops, and tablets meaning that schools will have to spend money on additional technology for these assessments – money that the districts may not have. Bandwidth in many regions is also an issue. Rothman, though, sees that although 20 states had reported decreased or stable budgets for K–12 education, and 28 reported cuts or level funding for state education agencies, “only 12 states reported cutting back on common core implementation because of budget constraints” and only “six states said they reduced technology expenditures.”