Massachusetts shifts away from Common Core
BOSTON — It has been one of the most stubborn problems in education: With 50 states, 50 standards and 50 tests, how could anyone really know what U.S. students were learning, or how well?
At a dinner with colleagues in 2009, Mitchell Chester, Massachusetts’ commissioner of education, hatched what seemed like an obvious answer — a national test based on the Common Core standards that almost every state had recently adopted.
Now Chester finds himself in the awkward position of walking away from the very test he helped create.
Onhis recommendation, the state Board of Education decided last week that Massachusetts would go it alone and abandon the multistate test in favor of one to be developed for just this state. The move will cost an extra year and unknown millions of dollars.
Across the country, what was once bipartisan consensus around national standards has collapsed into acrimony about the Common Core, with states dropping out of the two national tests tied to it that had been the centerpiece of the Obamaadministration’s education strategy. An about-face
But no about-face has resonated more than the one in Massachusetts, for years a leader in education reform. This state embraced uniform standards and tests with consequences more than two decades before the Common Core, and by 2005, its children led all states in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation’s report card, and rose above all other countries, save Singapore, in science.
The state’s participation was seen as validation of the Common Core and the multistate test; Chester became the chairman of the board that oversees the test Massachusetts joined. The state’s rejection of that test sounded the bell on common assessments, signaling that the future will now look much like the past — with more tests, but almost no ability to compare the difference between one state and another.
“It’s hugely symbolic because Massachusetts is widely seen as kind of the gold standard in successful education reform,” said Morgan Polikoff, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California, who is leading an evaluation of the national tests. “It opens the door for a lot of other states that are under a lot of pressure to repeal Common Core.”
The fight in Massachusetts has been dizzying, with a strange alliance be- tween the teachers’ union and a conservative think tank that years before had been a chief proponent of the state’s earlier drive for standards and high-stakes tests. As in other states, conservatives complained of federal overreach into local schooling, while the union objected to tying the tests to teacher evaluations. The debate drew money from national political players like the billionaire David Koch and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Amid the noise, many parents had trouble understanding what the Common Core was, or argued that the nation’s public schoolchildren took too many tests. So while parents and students here did not opt out of testing in the waves they did in places like New York and New Jersey, they also did not express much support.
“It’s much more about politics than it is about education,” said Tom Scott, the executive director of the state superintendents’ association, which had encouraged the state to keep the multistate test. Technical glitches
As states rolled out the new tests over the last two years, parents and teachers pushed back in states from Oregon to Florida. There were technical glitches, as well as complaints that the exams were too hard and too long. When states began reporting poor results, parents and policymakers did not necessarily see the benefit of comparing their schools with others.
But at hearings here this fall, many superintendents and teachers testified that the new test, known as PARCC, for the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, had improved what was happening in classrooms. Given the choice between the state’s old test and the multistate test this spring, more than half the state’s school districts chose PARCC.
Making his recommendation for a new test to the state board of education, Chester described it as the best of both worlds. The new test will use PARCC content, which better reflects the Common Core, but the state will maintain the flexibility to change or add material without having to go through a committee of multiple states.
Chester said Massachusetts would remain in the PARCC consortium so it could compare results with other states.
“We’re increasingly a global world,” he said. “And the idea that 50 different states in the United States had 50 different definitions of what it means to be literate and what it means to know math — and on top of that those 50 states had 50 different assessments to determine whether you’re literate or whether you know math — makes little sense.”