While some good has come from NCLB’s core approach — notably a clearer focus on outputs over inputs, the disaggregation of student results by race and ethnicity, and a revolution in education data — it is hard to argue that the law has lived up to its promise. Roughly one-third of students graduated ready for college or a career back then, and the same is true today.  Performance on international assessments , while recent trends on the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that performance is going in the wrong direction. 

Nor did NCLB put the nation on a path toward any semblance of educational equity, as . Eight percent of Black 12th graders, for example, are now proficient in math — up from 6 percent  back in 2005. At that rate of progress, it would take another 200 years for their performance to match that of white students, and that would assume white students’ performance stayed the same.  

Now, as schools try to address the profound learning losses caused by the pandemic, the NCLB playbook seems wildly out of touch. Students returned to school this fall in need of real solutions to support their educational and social-emotional recovery following 18 months of profound disruption. But for many schools, the challenges of filling an unprecedented level of staffing vacancies, implementing COVID-19 precautions and managing parent politics have taken all priority. Accountability based on end-of-year grade-level assessments may well be the last thing on their mind. 

Why did NCLB fail to deliver on its promise? Some will fault political opposition, economic conditions or bad implementation as key reasons, and there is some evidence to support each of these claims. However, we believe these explanations belie a larger truth that those who wish to improve our nation’s system of schooling can no longer ignore:

To modify the James Carville adage: It’s the model, stupid. 

While NCLB shaped the foundation for the work of those looking to reform education, it left the basic century-old industrial paradigm of how schooling happens intact. Schools function, by and large, with all same-aged students learning the same material at the same time from a single teacher and textbook. 

In the middle of the 19th century, this model was considered the most efficient way of supplying a factory-ready workforce that needed some assimilation and to be able to perform repetitive tasks, follow directions and apply basic numeracy and literacy skills. But from that point forward, nearly every effort at school improvement has been limited by its inherent constraints.

NCLB was only the latest of many well-intended school improvements that could not overcome the limits of the industrial paradigm of schooling. Raising academic standards can signal to teachers what they should expect, but they provide little guidance on what to do when students begin the school year multiple years behind. Good teacher training can make a big difference, but when skilled educators quit because of a fundamentally unsustainable role, it’s back to square one. Assessments can also be useful, but adjusting instruction to meet each student’s unique needs is near impossible. School choice can be a godsend for families whose children would otherwise be stuck in a low-performing school, but if the schools that are chosen are operating within the same industrial-era boundaries, differences may not be so stark.

Ironically, NCLB’s focus on trying to optimize a century-old delivery model took effect during the same time that other sectors saw the internet and its related technological advancements as an opportunity to modernize the ways in which they did business. From retail to energy to media to banking, the world of 2021 bears little resemblance to what existed at the dawn of the 21st century. Even churches now livestream on Sunday mornings. 

Many of these shifts were funded by commercial forces looking to leverage modern technologies to capture new segments of the marketplace. When early-stage investment was deemed too risky for private capital, public investments in research and development stepped in to fund breakthroughs such as the internet, GPS and mRNA vaccines.

NCLB did little to stoke any form of R&D investment to modernize the K-12 delivery model. In 2001, the federal government authorized — dead last among all federal agencies. That expenditure (and still dead last).  And since the vast majority of education R&D dollars have gone toward research and not development, in 2020 was actually aimed at building things that schools could actually use. By comparison, in 2020 on R&D, exploring new ways for teens to send digital photos to one another. 

Why has the industrial paradigm remained steadfast? Perhaps because there isn’t much effort aimed at creating any viable alternatives to it.

Beyond the lack of R&D, overcoming the limits of the paradigm was made even more difficult by the policies embedded within NCLB itself. Annual accountability for performance on grade-level-aligned exams meant everyone was on the hook for showing higher proficiency on the next year’s test. In response, many schools decided to hunker down and teach harder. 

But when the pandemic hit, the implications of trying to improve schooling without really changing it were fully laid bare. While the general public was still able to do much of what it could do pre-pandemic — order groceries, watch movies, pay bills, stay connected to friends — schooling was reduced to teachers scrambling to bring their industrial-era classrooms online or somehow make them work in a hybrid context. 

Make no mistake about it: It was optimization-only thinking at the heart of NCLB that left them in the lurch.

Parents are now onto all of this as well. Many had a front-row seat to Zoom school and didn’t like what they saw. A recent survey revealed they in how school happens. On their wish list: relevant and real-world learning, improved technology to better support instruction and greater customization to meet varied learning needs.

While some schools and districts will take bona fide steps to respond to these aspirations, many know that systemically achieving them within the constraints of the industrial paradigm is futile. 

It simply cannot be, in the 21st century, that the best way for students to learn about photosynthesis, parallelograms or the Vietnam War is through the pages of a tedious textbook in the company of 28 same-aged students. Yet, these core elements of an industrial paradigm from a time long past remain an ever-present design constraint that leaves millions of students bored, stressed and unable to access a high-quality education.

Nor does the factory-inspired model seem to work especially well for educators. Before the pandemic, teacher satisfaction had reached its . Now, more than a quarter of educators The pandemic made them , but the burden of reimagining what a classroom can look like cannot fall on their shoulders. 

If our ways of education are not working for students, for teachers or for the nation, how long will we continue down this path without laying the foundation for new ways of schooling? Can we not conceive of more effective ways to educate students that are not viewed through the industrial-era prism?

The architects of NCLB were right: Expectations matter. However, policies that center exclusively on optimization around the existing model of schooling reflect just the opposite — that the century-old way of doing school is simply the best we can hope for in the 21st century.

It’s not.   

As policymakers look forward to more recovery investment and to future reauthorizations of the federal education law itself, they would be wise to heed the most important lesson from the last 20 years: 

Our nation cannot force an educational system that leaves no child behind. It must invent one. 

Jenee Henry Wood is head of learning at Transcend, a national nonprofit organization that supports communities to create and spread extraordinary, equitable learning environments. Joel Rose is CEO of New Classrooms Innovation Partners, a national nonprofit organization focused on the development and adoption of innovative approaches to learning that personalize education for each student.

The bill, perhaps the centerpiece of Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda, had sprinted through the U.S. House and Senate before hitting the summer quagmire that so often ensnares federal legislation. Administration officials hoped that a presidential swing through Florida might reawaken Washington and speed its way to passage.

It was only minutes before the activities began when Bush learned that a plane had collided with one of the World Trade Center towers. Like many, Brogan initially assumed the reports referred to a light aircraft that had wandered off-course.

But as the room filled with the singsong cadence of kids reading aloud — the activity, centered on a called The Pet Goat, had been selected to draw attention to NCLB’s literacy provisions — the atmosphere changed noticeably. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card approached Bush to whisper the news of the second crash. And over a seven-minute interval that would be picked apart for years, the president’s focus seemed to drift between the children in front of him and the horrors unfolding in Manhattan. Brogan called the moment “extraordinary.”

“He didn’t change his expression, but the color in his face visibly changed, especially for people who were only a few feet from him. It was crystal-clear that whatever he just heard was very disturbing.”

As the activity wound down, the president excused himself to join a call with national security leaders. After stopping to deliver brief remarks from the school’s media center, including a moment of silence for the still-uncounted victims, Bush’s entourage headed immediately to Air Force One. The advocacy tour was over. A wartime presidency had begun.

The ties linking 9/11 with NCLB were the result of a historical accident. During the 20 years that passed since that day, the U.S. government undertook generational commitments to both rid the world of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism and provide an excellent education to every American child. Begun amid a swell of bipartisan approval, both missions fell far short of their goals as the afterglow of national unity first ebbed, then extinguished altogether. And while much of the vision of NCLB is preserved in federal law, controversial requirements around school accountability have been significantly loosened; some of the law’s original architects even attribute its demise, in substantial part, to a combination of hyperpartisanship and neglect that arose as the Bush administration turned its focus to the ever-expanding War on Terror.

“This is really what 9/11 meant: People moved on to other things,” said Sandy Kress, an education advisor to President Bush who helped lead the White House’s efforts to lobby for NCLB. “Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, plus the return of normal politics, that was huge. The president certainly moved on, and so did the rest of the world.”

Moving at ‘breakneck speed — for Washington’

Kress came to Washington after the 2000 election to transform the sweeping education proposals of then-Gov. Bush’s campaign into legislation. He spent years before that as a power player in Texas politics, serving as president of the Dallas school board before receiving appointments to a series of commissions empaneled throughout the 1990s to improve the state’s schools.

At that time, Washington’s role in K-12 schools offered barely a hint of what it would later become. The principal statute governing federal interventions in education, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, had been reauthorized in 1994 as the Improving America’s Schools Act, a fairly radical revision that required states to make “adequate yearly progress” toward proficiency for all their students. But reforms were still driven overwhelmingly by a set of ambitious governors: like Roy Roemer of Colorado, Jim Hunt of North Carolina and Bush of Texas.

By the time ESEA was due for another reauthorization, leaders in both parties were settling on a single model of reform. States would set high standards, deliver the instruction necessary to help students meet them, and institute regular assessments to keep an eye on their progress.

“I think people at the federal level realized they couldn’t get away any longer with simply saying, ‘America’s children aren’t learning enough, but just keep doing what you’re doing,’” said Brogan, who was elected as Florida’s commissioner of schools in 1994 and would go on to lead the state university systems of both Florida and Pennsylvania before serving as assistant secretary of education under president Donald Trump. “We had to come up with some new ideas…and at least spell out with clarity what kinds of things children were expected to master with each of the passing grade levels.”

That bipartisan convergence was reflected in placed on education reform by the campaigns of both Bush and Democrat Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election, argued Tom Loveless, former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. Bush, whose own package of reforms in Texas had won the admiration of even some Democrats in Congress — including California Rep. George Miller, an avowed liberal serving on the House Education and Workforce Committee — was only too happy to break with prevailing orthodoxy in order to build his brand as a different kind of Republican. That included moving away from the party’s oft-stated commitment to abolish the federal Department of Education.

“Bush simply jettisoned that,” Loveless said. “He dropped it completely — it was in the ’96 platform, but it was not in the 2000 platform because the Bush people wouldn’t allow it in.”

“That whole sweet thing that was put together in the ‘80s and came together in various states and then saw this incredible peak in Washington in 2001 — all of that largely fell apart because of 9/11, and the failure of everyone on all sides to hold it together in the wake of 9/11.”
—Sandy Kress, education advisor to former President George W. Bush.

Bush began setting a course for a major new education law almost as soon as the Supreme Court handed him the presidency, meeting at the White House in January with Miller, Sen. Ted Kennedy, and future Republican House Speaker John Boehner. , as the proposal soon became known, passed through both chambers even though it was loaded with tough language on equity and accountability. Under the new law, states would be required to test all students between grades 3-8, separate the data by class and ethnicity, and publish detailed school report cards based on the results. Billions of dollars in new federal funding would be allocated to support improvement efforts.

Margaret Spellings — a senior Bush advisor whom he would later appoint as U.S. secretary of education — said she didn’t fully appreciate at the time how quickly the initiative came together.

“I was a relative newcomer [to national politics], and little did I know that this was all happening at breakneck speed for Washington,” she said. “Particularly when we fast-forward 20 years, it really is amazing that this mammoth piece of policy, the major elements of which stand to this day, got done that fast.”

But the process stalled in conference, a lengthy process intended to iron out the differences between House and Senate versions. As the summer dragged on, dozens of conferees worked through a torturous debate over how to define adequate yearly progress, then left Washington for August recess. The economy was in recession, and the president’s approval ratings were ticking downward. Eager to return permanently to Texas, Kress began to worry how long his sojourn in the capital would last.

“By the end of the summer, things were not so rosy,” he recalled. “We were thinking about trying to rev it up and get going again, and that’s how that Florida trip was planned.”

Reinvigorating bipartisanship

At around 8:15 a.m. on September 11, Kress was in the president’s suite at Sarasota’s Colony Beach and Tennis resort, presenting him with talking points and a visual aid — a chart showing America’s education expenditures growing over time, plotted against stagnant national test scores — for what he hoped would be a news-making speech at Booker Elementary.

On campus, Kress skipped the classroom visit to brief reporters before the president took the stage. Instead, he watched with them as a television at the school’s media center broadcast live footage of United Airlines Flight 175 slamming into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. As the Secret Service moved hurriedly to coordinate the group’s departure, the stagecraft morphed from political salesmanship to an emergency speech.

“Now we’re getting instructions: ‘You are to come with me and stand right here, and the president’s going to give some remarks. First thing, take down the chart’ — I did that — ‘and then stand right here. And when the president says his last words, he will go, and you’ll be right on him, and you’re to get in the car.’ It was all solemn and lockstep.”

From the Sarasota airport, Air Force One sped to Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base (“The plane took off faster than I’d ever lifted off on a plane, and got higher than I’d ever been on a plane,” Kress noted.) There it shed most of its passengers while Bush, still considered a potential target, delivered before departing to another location with his key political and security staffers. With virtually every airplane in the country grounded, Kress and his companions only arrived back in Washington that evening, in time to see the smoking wreckage of the Pentagon attack.

Along with his fears for the country, and intermittently his own safety, he couldn’t help worrying about the fate of the historic law he’d spent most of the year negotiating. Would the massive loss of life, to say nothing of the inevitable military action that would follow, leave room for a huge, expensive law overhauling K-12 schools?

As it turned out, he would later reflect, the collective outrage provoked by the attacks proved vastly more effective at pushing NCLB to the finish line than any messaging event could have. Congress would soon be occupied with authorizing the use of force in Afghanistan and drafting the USA Patriot Act, but both Democrats and Republicans also sought the chance to pass a major piece of domestic legislation and show that the nation’s business was still underway.

“9/11 probably reinvigorates bipartisanship for a bit,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin College on the politics of NCLB. “And there was an idea that we have to show, as a country, that we can make progress on things other than terrorism and war: ‘This is something we’ve already gotten most of the way through, and we should do it.’”

Before the year was out, overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate voted to accept the version of the bill that emerged from the conference committee. On January 8, 2002, Bush signed it, flanked by its congressional stewards, at an Ohio school located in Boehner’s district. The group then proceeded to Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts for a celebration at the famed exam school Boston Latin. Only time constraints prevented them from flying to Miller’s California stomping grounds, Kress said.

In retrospect, No Child Left Behind was likely too far down the tracks to be derailed by events. But, as Spellings argued, the rush of purpose and unity following 9/11 put “a rocket booster” under it; moreover, national attention was significantly diverted from the last months of negotiations, which may have made final concessions go down smoother.

“They were trying to hold that coalition together without offending the far left or far right,” Loveless said — a towering task, given that teachers disliked the new testing requirements and conservatives resented losing out on a longed-for federal voucher program. “Bush really wanted a bipartisan bill, and I think the focus on foreign policy allowed them to do whatever they needed to do in conference and get the bill out.”

A short honeymoon

American flags were still flying from windows, and the renewed sense of national assurance only beginning to waver, when skepticism of NCLB began festering in school districts and state capitals.

Conflict arose almost immediately over new money. Under the law, total federal funding for K-12 schools between 2000 and 2003. But for schools now awakening to the threat of sanctions (including governance changes like the mass replacement of staff or restructuring as a charter school) if their students didn’t make consistent, measurable strides toward college readiness, it seemed unfair that escalating expectations on their staffs weren’t accompanied by continuing commitments of resources.

Their doubts spread soon enough to the public at large. In Brookings, Loveless noted that surveys from the law’s early years demonstrated little widespread understanding of its impact, including penalties for consistently underperforming schools. But as participants learned more of NCLB’s key provisions, they consistently came to like it less, he found.

“I think one thing NCLB was able to paper over was the fact that it did have punitive measures involved,” Loveless argued. “When people were polled on the question, in 2001 or 2002, ‘What do you do with a failing school?,’ respondents overwhelmingly supported giving more resources to that school — not closing it or transferring teachers or anything like that.”

Combined with its “utopianism” — the law put forward the aspiration that every student in the country would reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014, a starry-eyed notion that later became a punchline — NCLB’s main weakness lay in its fundamental challenge to Americans’ sunny perceptions of schools, Loveless said.

“It’s been a mainstay in polling: People are just happy with their local schools. And parents are even happier with the schools they send their own children to. So once it became evident that those schools were also endangered by sanctions and maybe weren’t quite what they were cracked up to be, [the law] lost some popularity.”

Eventually the dissatisfaction spread to Washington, where even NCLB’s supporters were increasingly bogged down in the fervid debate over whether Bush’s “Global War on Terror” should extend to Iraq. Along with industry groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, a diverse alliance of civil rights organizations including EdTrust, La Raza, and the Urban League had pushed hard to make testing and accountability a reality in every American school; but by 2004, NAACP chairman its mandates of fostering a “drill-and-kill curriculum.”

Consistent blows were landed by none other than Kennedy, a figure as vital to NCLB’s passage as any except the president. On the second anniversary of the happy ceremony held at Boston Latin, Kennedy’s office issued giving Bush a “D-minus” for rolling out his signature education reform. In an unmistakable dig at Bush’s famous photo op of the previous year, the release called it “way too soon for the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner on No Child Left Behind.”

For the temporary boost it delivered to American pride and purpose, Kress said, September 11 ultimately sabotaged the “nice, short-term story” of NCLB’s enactment.

“Passing a bill should be a very positive event in a movement, but if you think passing a bill is the culmination of a movement, then you don’t understand politics,” he said. “That whole sweet thing that was put together in the ‘80s and came together in various states and then saw this incredible peak in Washington in 2001 — all of that largely fell apart because of 9/11, and the failure of everyone on all sides to hold it together in the wake of 9/11.”

Though NCLB’s authors intended for the law to be reauthorized by 2007, it remained in effect for another eight years as controversy built up over its demands on states and school districts. have credited the landmark legislation with lifting student achievement and closing achievement gaps , but it has also been blamed for through an over-reliance on testing.

Those concerns contributed to the push to replace NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which offered states more latitude to design their own systems for measuring school performance. In the years since its 2015 passage, committed reformers have complained that the new law is far too slack, allowing states to potentially ignore failing schools and that reveal which students are falling behind.

Spellings credited NCLB’s supporters in Congress, industry, and the civil rights world with ensuring that many of its key principles remained in place. But she also warned that a political retreat from testing and accountability was underway, “flying under the banner of COVID and mental health and all other manner of bullshit.”

“The secret sauce — and this is what’s under threat in the states — is annual assessments, disaggregated data, and transparency,” she said. “It’s at risk.”

Rudalevige’s research as a political scientist ultimately led him to study the growing powers of the “imperial presidency.” He agreed that it became increasingly challenging for politicians to mend or improve NCLB — still less reauthorize it — once debates over the War on Terror came to “distract attention and dissolve whatever bipartisanship was still left.“.

“Could you do it if you had full presidential attention? Maybe, but Bush didn’t have that, and he didn’t have the institutional resources to make it work without that. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could put on auto-pilot.”

Lead Image: President George W. Bush was reading with a group of Florida second-graders when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, delivered the news that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. (Paul Richards and George W. Bush Presidential Library/Getty Images) Photo illustration by Meghan Gallagher/The 74

Whatever happened to Common Core?

That’s the question that veteran education researcher Tom Loveless asks in the final chapter of , Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core. Released this spring by Harvard Education Press, the slim volume examines the debate around the ambitious reform and the inherent limits of trying to improve education systems through regulatory means.

To the regret of its (often very vocal) detractors, nothing much seems to have happened to Common Core; even after a furious political battle in the late Obama years, most states still have some version of the controversial academic standards on the books. States attempting to replace them with new learning frameworks were often engaged in than a substantive overhaul, and once a few years had passed, politicians moved on to new skirmishes in the education culture wars.

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But a decade after they were first adopted by states, little evidence exists to show that teaching or learning was significantly improved by the vast resources poured into implementing the standards. At least one study has found students in states that were early adopters of Common Core scored slightly lower on both the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s reading and math portions. If the point of spending billions of dollars to establish the mammoth set of new learning guidelines was to make sure kids became “college- and career-ready” (to use a term that was ubiquitous around 2013), not much progress seems to have been made toward that goal.

A former sixth-grade teacher, Harvard professor, and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Loveless has watched the development of academic standards for decades, ultimately concluding that they are an ineffective tool to improve K-12 education. As he argued to The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, regulatory reforms like Common Core are riven with utopian expectations and unlikely to change what actually goes on in classrooms.

“The problem is inherent to top-down efforts at controlling curriculum and instruction,” Loveless writes in the book. “This is not a problem that another set of standards can solve. If standards came out tomorrow, and I agreed with every single word in them, I would still give them only a slim chance of being faithfully implemented — and less than that of moving the needle on student achievement.”

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Kevin Mahnken: Your book focuses deeply on the shortcomings of academic standards. But as a reporter, the impression I’ve developed has been that K-12 education has really been driven over the last few decades by testing and accountability reforms like No Child Left Behind. Do you think people underestimate the importance of standards — not just Common Core, but also the state based standards that preceded it?

Tom Loveless: The accountability movement of the ’90s was all based on standards. There was no state in my memory that went out and created an accountability system where the accountability was based on something other than standards. They all had tests, which were written on a grade-level basis to conform with the standards those states had adopted. So it’s hard to untangle accountability from the question of standards.

In the book, I took a much longer historical perspective. I go back over 100 years to look at standards as a regulatory tool: You’ve got upper-level officials who are trying to influence what schools do with kids in terms of what they teach. That’s been going on forever, and always with limited success. It’s hard for the top of the system to have a large impact on what happens at the bottom of the system.”

That sounds right in terms of the different levers of school reform — tests are based on standards, grad schools prepare future educators to teach to those standards, etc. So they’re at the center of things.

Right, but there’s a nuance there: Those early accountability systems were not about making sure teachers followed the standards; they made sure that teachers and schools produced scores on tests that were aligned to the standards. That’s actually a completely different thing. It was test-based accountability, and there’s a separate literature on that that’s fairly positive. If you hold schools accountable for scoring on a test, and have either rewards or sanctions, you can raise those test scores. There are three or four well-designed studies that show that.

But that’s a whole different issue from what Common Core was about. If you go back and read all the Common Core documents, those standards don’t touch the accountability question at all. And as a matter of fact, the accountability systems post-Common Core — some of the Common Core authors suspect this is why Common Core had little impact — withered away. We have very soft accountability today compared with NCLB, which kind of poisoned the waters for accountability because of the way it was designed.

Do you think the basic proposition of standards-based reform — i.e., that some students just weren’t being held to high standards — was valid? It sounds like you’re saying that rigorous academic expectations aren’t enough on their own to improve K-12 education, but are they a necessary ingredient?

Yes, some states did have standards that were too low. Some districts, some schools, some teachers had standards that were too low. But the question is, can you then force states with low standards to have high standards, and will that have a positive impact? I don’t think you can.

There was a lot of research in the ’90s and the ’00s: Mississippi or some other state had terrible standards, and lots of kids were scoring proficient, but on NAEP, they never even got close [to proficiency]. So obviously the state has much lower standards than what you’d want. But the people in Mississippi read the newspaper; they know their NAEP scores. And where’s the political pressure from the state, from the bottom up, to fix that? Now, in a lot of places, there was that pressure. But if it’s not there, can you come in from some supra-state level and force higher standards onto a state that they implement with fidelity, and eventually believe in? Because if they don’t, you’re probably not going to get very much.

Now take that same argument and just swap out the actors: Can a state come in and do the same thing to a reluctant district? Can a district come in and do it with a reluctant school? See, I don’t even think a school principal can do that in his own building with a teacher who has low standards. So the idea that we’re going to have this broad-scaled, top-down implementation of standards in a way that improves learning — that’s the thing I’m skeptical of. It’s just never worked, and it didn’t work with Common Core. So the whole approach is flawed.

The most recent evidence I’ve seen about the impact of Common Core on academic achievement comes from Joshua Bleiberg’s study in AERA Open, which found a pretty modest boost to NAEP math scores. Is that typical of the research findings thus far, and do we have reason to think that the reform’s effects could grow with time?

I consider the Bleiberg effect, a positive effect of about .1 standard deviations, to be the upper bound of what the different studies show. The , which I spend more time with in the book, shows a .1 [standard deviation] decrease, which is kind of the lower bound, and all of my own studies fall in between those two boundaries. The probable real effect of Common Core — although I’m not that confident in any of these studies, including my own — is probably somewhere within that range. And that is disappointing, there’s no other way to say it. Especially over many, many years of implementation, all the money that was spent on it, all the teacher development, and the debate that got so bitter and nutty. What a distraction to get us so fired up over one-tenth of a standard deviation. It’s just miniscule.

There’s one thing in the study that gets at the question: “What if we just stuck with this thing? Maybe there are great things that are going to happen just over the horizon.” If you read Bleiberg’s analysis, most of the effect kicks in after the first two years. It’s not going up; if anything, it’s petering out. The C-SAIL study found that the effect was not only negative, but that it was getting more negative over time. So even though those two studies have different signs in front of the effect — one’s positive, one’s negative — they really kind of find the same thing: The most positive impact was very early in the process of implementing Common Core. To me, that makes total sense because all the professional development, the initial billions of dollars, was all spent in the first few years to get this thing off the ground. I don’t know any study of professional development that says, ‘Oh, wait a decade, and then really good things kick in.’ It just doesn’t work that way.

You mentioned that you’re not totally sure about the findings in these studies, including your own. What are the challenges in measuring effects from reforms like Common Core?

In my work, I don’t even make a causal claim because there are too many impediments to do that.

Both Bleiberg and the C-SAIL study used an interrupted time series design. In order to do that, you need to have a very clear break period: Here’s when this thing didn’t exist, and then on this day, it existed. There are studies that use that design very effectively — for instance, a Josh Angrist study of [the effects of] lowering the age at which people can buy alcohol, which was a big issue in the ’70s. A lot of states lowered their legal drinking age from 21 to 18, and those laws went into effect at midnight on January 1. So suddenly, the bars were filled with 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds, whereas before, they couldn’t get in. There was a clear cut-point in the state’s actions that could be measured in terms of pre and post. Academic standards just don’t work that way.

A few different researchers studying Common Core, including myself, ended up going about it in the same way. Virtually all the states in the country adopted Common Core, and you had to sort them: one group that really did Common Core, another group that sort of adopted it and did a half-baked approach, and then the five states that just rejected Common Core. Those were the three groups whose NAEP scores I tried to measure over time. Pretty much all of my analysis showed the same thing, which was very little effect.

Another problem was that the natural comparison group is the five states that rejected Common Core from the beginning: Texas, Virginia, Nebraska, Alaska, and Minnesota in math — they kept their existing math standards but adopted the ELA standards. But each of those states, if you go back and read the standards they did adopt, they’re not terribly different from Common Core. And it’s not as if Common Core was revolutionary; it wasn’t the first set of standards that said, ‘You know, we should teach kids fractions!’ I would argue that Common Core has 80-90 percent overlap with the previous standards that a lot of states had.

So that invites the notion of just what the change was. Of course, the Common Core people would say, ‘It led to better curriculum, better instruction, better tests,’ and again, there’s no evidence of that. Anyway, that’s just a taste of some of the methodological constraints on measuring this.

Is the main problem here that states and districts didn’t implement Common Core well? Or is it just asking too much of academic standards to expect them to really improve teaching and learning? It seems like Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California who also wrote for Harvard, feels that . 

I just did on [American Enterprise Institute scholar] Nat Malkus’s podcast. He started with that question: Is it a problem of implementation, or a problem with the theory of action? Morgan and I both said that the theory itself is flawed. We can’t engineer our way to better standards.

Again, standards are a regulatory tool, and we’re not going to be able to simply regulate better K-12 learning. It’s not going to work that way. Just to give an example — and this isn’t necessarily bad or good implementation, it’s just what happens — when you ask some teachers or district people what the main tenets of Common Core mathematics are, they’ll say, ‘Well, kids need to be working in groups.’ And then they’ll list a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with Common Core, which does not mandate that kids work in groups. It doesn’t even talk about that! It was like NCLB in that if you asked people what it meant, you’d get different answers in different places.

Not long ago, I wrote an article about the press coverage of Common Core and its implementation. Within a couple of years of Common Core’s adoption, you’d have journalists attending these workshops where professional development was being given. And in a particular math workshop, the developer was saying all the stuff I just mentioned: “You need to put your kids in groups, you need to be using manipulatives, you need to deemphasize procedures and rote learning, you need to emphasize conceptual understanding.” Now, Common Core does shoulder some guilt on the conceptual understanding thing, but it doesn’t say you should deemphasize anything.

The point is that, everywhere across the country, we have educators who have belief systems of their own. And if they believe in putting kids in groups, or believe in what we used to call ‘progressive education,’ or student-centered instructional practices, they’re going to interpret any policy coming down the line to promote those things; they’re going to read the documents through that lens. It’s not a heartfelt effort to distort, and these people aren’t sinister. It’s just how they read things. So you’re going to get actual implementation that’s different from what’s on paper, like the old children’s game of telephone where things sound different at the end of the line. That’s not corrupt intent, it’s that you have so many people sifting through these things as they make their way down the system.

It sounds like if you want to really change instruction through academic standards, you’d have to be so prescriptive just to avoid people doing something totally unrelated to what you want. 

And besides that, standards tend to be utopian. They tend to be aspirational, wishful thinking, and Common Core is a clear example of that. Common Core used this phrase, “college- and career-ready,” and then mapped standards back from the twelfth grade. But nobody yet has defined “career-ready” in such a way that doesn’t really just mean “college-ready.” At least, I haven’t seen any good definition of career readiness come out of these standards movements. So you can just delete the word “career,” and essentially what these standards are saying is, “Everybody, 100 percent, will be ready for college by the end of high school.” That’s very much like NCLB’s 100 percent proficiency goal. So what did the test makers, both PARCC and Smarter Balanced, do? They adopted NAEP proficiency as their standard.

The last batch of data I saw from the states that still use Smarter Balanced showed that 32 percent of eleventh-graders pass in math, and 68 percent fall below the threshold indicating readiness. If Common Core were working at all — and if we should have faith in this test to measure a goal that we could actually achieve — we’d be doing better than 32 percent. I mean, are you going to deny a diploma to two-thirds of the kids because they fail math? Politically, it’s a non-starter.

A lot of the reformers point to high-achieving countries like Singapore and South Korea, but if you map international assessments like TIMSS and PISA onto NAEP proficiency, it shows that at least 25 percent of their populations would fail. And these are the highest-achieving countries on the planet. So the goals are ones that no society has ever attained, and it’s not going to happen.

You’ve also written previously about the fact that NAEP proficiency levels might just be set too high. The NCES commissioner basically said as much in of the National Assessments Governing Board.

It turns our national test, which should be something that gives real information, into a kind of disinformation. It makes it like one of those late-night cable ads: “You can look like this if you just buy cans of this stuff and drink it five times a day!” It doesn’t work, it winds up undermining the validity, and I think Common Core suffers from it all. If you look at the outcomes by the end of high school, they’re much more than ambitious; they’re unrealistic.