Tag: Mike Petrilli

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Has Common Core Failed?

The answer to the question, “has Common Core failed?” depends on what you think the goals of the Common Core movement were. In my mind, here’s a short list of what the Common Core movement accomplished:

  • More rigorous state standards;
  • More commonality across different sets of state standards; and
  • A further push on the idea that K-12 schools should prepare students to be “college- and career-ready.”

If, however, you held out hope that state standards themselves would lead to higher student achievement, well, you should read Morgan Polikoff and Tom Loveless’ columns in this Education Next debate on the long-term impacts of the Common Core.

Taking the opposing view, Mike Petrilli argues that Common Core just hasn’t had an effect yet. Ten years into the Common Core era, I’m with Polikoff and Loveless: Improving state standards may have been a worthy policy to pursue, but any downstream effects should be showing up by now. If anything, implementation fidelity is getting worse over time, not better. And, although Petrilli seems to think the opposite, I attribute the Common Core as one of several contributing factors that led to the weaker accountability systems adopted in the wake of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.

From my vantage point, the Common Core was a perfectly good idea that got over-extended and over-hyped.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Latest Edu-Reads

Mike Antonucci asks, if teachers unions are bargaining “for the common good,” what are the elected mayors and school boards on the other side of the table bargaining for?

A new paper finds that, “Social Security is the most equal form of retirement wealth and the most important source for most minority households,” and yet 40 percent of public school employees lack Social Security benefits.

“Just like an unpaid credit card balance that grows over time, the longer states delay paying off [their pension debt], the bigger the debt price tag becomes, consuming an ever-greater share of the finite pool of public dollars available for teachers and students.” Marguerite Roza quantifies the extent of that debt for California, Illinois, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas, and Vermont.

Julie Squire takes the high ground is glad to welcome Cory Booker back into the charter school tent (where he had been for most of his career!).

Speaking of zingers, Mike Petrilli notes that Montgomery County leaders talk a good game on equity, and yet the district, “doesn’t offer a single extra penny to teachers assigned to the district’s toughest schools — those serving large proportions of kids living in poverty who often come to school with unmet needs and below grade-level proficiency.”

Here’s an interesting report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on household debt and credit. Two big takeaways: At least in the last 15 years, student loan debt delinquency rates are higher and much less volatile than other types of debt:

Two, delinquency rates are tied to age. Per the first graph, that’s largely tied to student loans, but older Americans have the lowest delinquency rates while the youngest adults have much higher rates of default:

 

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Latest Edu-Reads

Texas is in the midst of redesigning remedial courses at the state’s colleges and universities. This Dallas Observer piece has a good overview of what they did and how it’s going. Here’s the key quote: “During the fall 2018 semester, the first after the new model went into effect, the state saw 10,000 more students pass their first college-level course than during the fall 2017 semester.”

This is a super cool data visualization tool on FAFSA completion rates from Ellie Bruecker. You can narrow in on certain geographic regions or search by school name and see how FAFSA completions are trending over time.

“UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison lie just 80 miles apart, but they might as well be on different planets when it comes to access and outcomes.” That’s from James Murphy in a new brief for Education Reform Now.

Florida has been a leader on teacher retirement policy, but I suggest a couple ways they could do even better.

“The key argument against exit exams—that they depress graduation rates—does not hold for [end-of-course exams].” That and more in this Fordham report on end-of-course exams.

Speaking of Fordham, I’ve enjoyed Mike Petrilli’s summer blog series on big-picture trends in education over the last 25 years. The whole thing is worth reading, but this paragraph from his series finale provides a nice summary:

The achievement of low-performing kids and children of color rose dramatically from the late 1990s until the Great Recession. That was mostly because of improving social and economic conditions for these children, but accountability reforms and increased spending played a role, as well. Over the last decade, that progress has mostly petered out. And the gains we made were, of course, not nearly enough, as they mostly meant getting more kids to a basic level of literacy and numeracy and walking across the high school graduation stage—nowhere near the goal of readiness for college, career, and citizenship that is the proper objective of our K–12 system.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman