What has seven years of Common Core done to our nation’s schools and students? A new report says it’s had “significantly negative effects.”

Remember, it was Bill Gates who admitted our kids were being used as guinea pigs when he said in 2013: “It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.”

The moms didn’t need a decade to know if it worked.

We saw it imploding at our kitchen tables. And we didn’t need this study to know Common Core is an experimental, untested, age and developmentally inappropriate educational fad. And it’s a failure.

The preliminary report comes from the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction and Learning (C-SAIL). The draft is authored by researchers Mengli Song, Rui Yang, and Michael Garet of the American Institutes for Research.

A lot of the report relies on 1990–2017 NAEP data in reading and mathematics for grades 4 and 8, uses existing research and utilizes the Scholastic Survey results from 2013, which Bill Gates paid for.

Click Me.

The opening parts of the report give a little background on how and why Common Core was adopted. To be sure, the background given in the report is oversimplified, leaving out a few key details. For example, how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid the Fordham Institute to torpedo state standards nationwide in order to pave the way for Common Core.

It’s clear that student achievement is unquestionably lower since the introduction of the Common Core Standards:

“Contrary to our expectation, we found that CCR Standards had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards, and had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of NAEP composite scores. The size of these negative effects, however, was generally small, ranging from -0.10 to -0.06 SDs.”

The size of these effects was “generally small.” Tell that to the millions of kids who can’t do basic math or who are refusing to read because of Common Core. In a related vein, the report highlights the huge disconnect between what teachers are/were reporting and the actual academic outcomes of the students.

The C-SAIL report cannot hide that over time the decline in student achievement grew steadily worse. What’s more, the data analysis implies that students across the board would have done better if Common Core was never implemented:

“had the states continued with their old standards, thus reflecting negative effects of the new CCR standards.”

“It’s rather unexpected,” researcher Mengli Song of the American Institutes for Research told Chalkbeat. “The magnitude of the negative effects tend to increase over time. That’s a little troubling.”

To be sure, these researchers made sure to makes excuses for the declines using old favorites like ‘there wasn’t any appropriate curriculum’ and ‘training was an issue’.

The best excuse was that the study was ‘limited’ because  “NAEP scores—are not perfectly aligned with the CCR standards.” If the standards lifted learning and achievement the way they were billed to, these kids should be acing tests like the NAEP.

Overall, it’s a damning condemnation of a mess Common Core has created, the consequences of which an entire generation now having a limited and handicapped k-12 education.

Keep the articles coming.
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