New study: teaching changing under Common Core but student results not evident

Education Week reports that a new study from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University shows Common Core State Standards are definitely driving changes in the way teachers teach, but results for students remain “elusive.” In other words, there isn’t evidence so far that all these classroom changes make a difference for students.

The EdWeek article shows very large percentages of math teachers have placed increased emphasis on Progressive Education ideas like emphasizing conceptual understanding and application of skills and knowledge, while only a minority of math teachers is emphasizing procedural skills. In fact, there has been a drop in emphasis in procedural skills in many classrooms.

In English language arts, large proportions of teachers report increased emphasis on assigning writing with use of evidence and use of nonfiction reading assignments. There has been a notable decline in emphasis in areas of writing about real or imaginary experiences and there also is a drop in the use of literature for reading assignments (one of the most controversial of the Common Core impacts).For sure, these changes are what the Common Core calls for.

BUT The Harvard team reports there is scant evidence that any of the teaching changes pushed by Common Core are resulting in better student performance. Only a few of the new, Common Core driven instructional improvement strategies are related to any student gains. Those few areas of gain were noted by math department chairs but not by teachers or principals.

The Harvard report itself says:

“Notably, we did not find strong associations between students’ performance on the mathematics assessments and the extent to which teachers changed their classroom instruction or instructional materials.”

Over the years, teacher collaboration has been heavily pushed in Kentucky by many groups including the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence.

That makes another finding from Harvard more surprising and disturbing. The actual Harvard Report says:

“We did not find statistically significant relationships for some other implementation strategies that practitioners and educators frequently cited as important during our initial interviews and in the surveys. For example, a full quarter of all teachers ranked collaboration with their colleagues as the single most important strategy in helping them prepare for the new standards; another 15% considered it the second most important strategy. Moreover, nearly half of the teachers (45%) reported collaborating with their colleagues every week on a CCSS-related topic. However, we did not find any significant relationships between the frequency of teacher collaboration and student achievement for either mathematics or ELA (Emphasis Added).”

Could teacher collaboration be yet another idea that doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work without a lot of very careful management that might not be so easy to obtain?

Certainly, more research is needed, but the initial indications from this Harvard report are that some of the teaching changes currently pushed by Common Core, many similar to things pushed in Kentucky in the early 1990s, are not working any better for students this time, at least so far.