Blog: Common Core

Military-run schools lead every U.S. state in NAEP scores and even outperform educational juggernauts abroad—despite half of their students living at the poverty line. “Lessons from Military-Run Schools: America’s Secret Weapon in Education” argues that, rather than embracing new fads and experimental programs, American public schools ought to be studying the DoDEA playbook. 

By failing to believe in students’ capabilities, and to set standards accordingly, we have condemned many to illiteracy and generally dire educational outcomes—in sum, incapability.  This need not be the case, and for a brief moment, in Massachusetts and other educational hotspots, it wasn’t.

COVID-19 was not the beginning of student performance declines in the United States. Academic achievement for students across the country began to drop-off following the widespread implementation of the Common Core curriculum in 2013. While declines have occurred across the country, New England has experienced a particularly sharp decrease in student achievement.

In a recent blog, Dr. Michael Kirst, past president of the California State Board of Education, attempts to defend his record of Common Core implementation during that period. But policy experts Ze’ev Wurman & Williamson Evers set the Golden State's record during Common Core straight.

Many billions have been spent, and continue to be spent, promoting the Common Core Standards and their associated consortium tests, PARCC and SBAC. Nonetheless, the “Initiative” has been stopped in its tracks largely by a loose coalition of unpaid grassroots activists. That...

Guest post by Richard P. Phelps The Fordham Institute has long been at work on a study of the relative quality of tests produced by the two Common Core-aligned and federally funded consortia (PARCC and SBAC), ACT (Aspire), and the Commonwealth of...

When it comes to the “confidence game” that has been played around the country to advance Common Core standards, there are few places where connivance was more on display than in West Virginia.  As noted in a post in March of 2012,...

We applaud the Baker administration for proposing that Massachusetts retain its academic independence and testing autonomy, but the Commonwealth should reject any further participation in the PARCC consortium. MCAS has served Massachusetts very well for nearly two decades. The test and the...

Guest Post by Richard P. Phelps On November 17, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) will decide the fate of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and the Partnership for Assessment of College Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)...

An op-ed in Tuesday’s Boston Globe urges Massachusetts policymakers to adopt the Common Core-aligned PARCC test because MCAS is supposedly too outdated to help prepare our schoolchildren for future success. But as Pioneer has argued in our recent book, and numerous reports,...