Do Kentuckians really overwhelmingly support the Common Core State Standards – Part 2

State board member scores Novice for understanding of random sample surveying

Sadly, the fiction level around the Kentucky Core Academic Standards Challenge ratcheted up again on July 21, 2015 when the Courier-Journal published an Op-Ed from the vice chair of the Kentucky Board of Education, Jay Parrent.

Parrent’s Op-Ed proclaims “4,000 comments on standards show broad support.”

No, sir! The Challenge doesn’t begin to provide us such information. In fact, the Challenge doesn’t begin to tell us what the average Kentuckian thinks about Common Core. It doesn’t even tell us what the vast majority of Kentucky’s teachers – about 95 percent of them – think about Common Core.

The major thing the Challenge tells us is that if you set up a response-collecting web site in a loaded manner that totally locks out major criticism and makes it challenging to even offer minor criticism, you will get the inevitable result that only supporters of the standards are likely to bother to respond.

Sadly, the Kentucky lesson about how to set up a biased Common Core survey web site has not been lost on other states. Similar nonsense is under way now in West Virginia and Louisiana. In fact, the web sites in both states sound like they were modeled after Kentucky’s. I would not be surprised if the results in those states also get hyped like they come from valid random sample surveys, either.

Speaking of a valid random sample of Kentuckians’ real feelings about Common Core, so far I am unaware of any released results from any recent valid samples of Kentuckians’ attitudes. Maybe that will change soon. I hope so, because it takes something a lot more valid than the results from the highly biased Kentucky Core Academic Standards Challenge to determine what most Kentuckians really do think about Common Core.

If you missed my earlier blogs, the Kentucky Department of Education started something called the “Kentucky Core Academic Standards Challenge” about 10 months ago.

The Challenge was supposed to collect comments from the public about the Kentucky standards, which are basically just cut-and-paste adoptions of the Common Core State Standards.

However, the format of the Challenge didn’t come close to being a valid random sample survey of Kentuckians attitudes about the Common Core. For example:

• Participation was “self-selected,” not random.

• Restrictions in the survey automatically locked out all responses from individuals who want major changes to the standards or want them completely removed in Kentucky. There is no way to know how many people that eliminated.

• Teachers only comprise about 1.2 percent of the state’s total adult population but made up about half of the Challenge respondents. That is an obvious bias.

• With only about 2,000 self-selected teachers responding, we only know about the opinions of around 4.6 percent of our teachers. Maybe other teachers are happy; maybe they are not. And, maybe teachers were too afraid to speak out. There is no way to know from the Challenge.

• There were about 3,383,280 adults in the state in 2013. The total Challenge response of only 4,000 people includes only about one tenth of one percent of the state’s adult population. That’s not much of a sample if very careful random sampling was not conducted (which it wasn’t).

The Kentucky Core Academic Challenge didn’t come close to being a valid random sample survey.

Never the less, even though the survey was not a valid random sample study, the fiction that the results could somehow tell us what Kentuckians in general think about Common Core began several weeks ago when the Kentucky Department of Education put out News Release 15-066 with the misleading title “Kentuckians Strongly Support Current Academic Standards.”

I wrote a blog at that time that pointed out that the data collected in the survey didn’t come close to being a valid random sample and could not support such sweeping claims about what Kentuckians in general think about Common Core.

But, some lessons are apparently hard to learn. So, now we have additional nonsense in the Courier regarding this rather small, self-selected and biased survey’s results. And, other states are following Kentucky's deceptive lead with their own biased surveys. That’s rather sad.