Highly experimental nature of Common Core becomes clearer with call in Education Week for research

Education Week just posted an article titled “Common-Core Rollout Ripe for Studying, Experts Say.”

This article makes it quite clear that much of the “stuff” coming with the new Common Core State Standards (and the Next Generation Science Standards) is untested, and research about what will work is badly needed.

Concerning Common Core, Pascal D. "Pat" Forgione Jr., executive director of the K-12 Center at the Educational Testing Service and a former Commissioner of Education Statistics at the National Center for Education Statistics told a group meeting at the Center on Education Policy that:

"We need significant R&D work."

The article contains this intriguing comment about Kentucky:

“Most of the public is not familiar with the common core, and in states now debating the common core, such as Kentucky and Colorado, bringing up federal funding for research and implementation could make people suspicious of federal stakes in the initiative.”

I think that is a fair analysis. There is a growing group of Common Core critics who are indeed very concerned about obvious moves by the federal government to more or less usurp what did start out as a non-governmental project.

There is even an amusing comment from Jacqueline King, the director of higher education collaboration for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Smarter-Balanced is one of the two federally-funded consortia developing tests for the common core. Says King:

"If the feds were to say they would do a 'common-core center,' they'd have governors on the phone saying, 'What are you trying to do, kill us?'"

Why King thinks that local folks would be upset about feds doing research but somehow would not be upset by the feds funding, and controlling, the Common Core tests is a mystery to me.

In any event, the article makes it clear that there wasn’t much advanced research into how Common Core was really going to operate. That has generated some interesting comments from readers of this Education Week article. It also raises a lot of important questions about claims that Common Core is research based. Apparently, the researchers don’t think so.