What’s Next for the Common Core? A Look at Assessments

This morning, the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education and The Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy, held the second in a series of three forums to examine the implementation of the Common Core State Standards in Massachusetts. 

At our first session in February, a distinguished panel of educators and state officials discussed what it will take to develop curricula and instructional methodologies to implement the Common Core.  Today, we turned our attention to the critical question of assessments.  But before looking forward, it may be helpful to take a few minutes to look back.

The first step of the 1993 education reform was the articulation of high, rigorous standards that reflected our collective best judgment as to what children in Massachusetts needed to master to compete at a high level in a global economy and to participate in our society as thoughtful, critical citizens.  The Commonwealth developed a set of curriculum frameworks to that end, and by all accounts the resulting frameworks were of high quality and articulated in detail a body of knowledge and a set of skills that went a long way toward meeting the ambitious goals of the reform.

But the drafters of the education reform act recognized very clearly that high quality standards required equally high quality tools to measure whether and to what extent students met or fell short of those standards.  Without such assessment tools, the education system flies blind.  And if those assessments had not carried significant consequences for both students and educators, one wonders whether those high standards would have been taken seriously. 

And so, the Commonwealth developed MCAS.  Although MCAS generated (and still generates) considerable controversy, we believe the combination of high standards and MCAS must be considered at least a qualified success.  Massachusetts students as a whole rank at the top of many national, and some international, measures of student achievement.

But there is still much to be done.  Massachusetts faces chronic racial and socio-economic achievement gaps that remind us that our success has not reached every child.  Just one example:  A recent study by the U.S. Department of Education found only 41% of the lowest income students are graduating from 4-year colleges as compared to a 67% rate for the highest income students.  Moreover, success as compared to other states is not enough.  Our children will compete not only with peers from Miami and Chicago, but also with young people in Berlin, Beijing, and Mumbai.  

Moreover, for all its virtues, and they are many, there is an important sense in which MCAS does not attempt to answer the right question.  The right question is whether students leaving public schools in Massachusetts are ready for college and career.  MCAS does not purport to answer that question.  MCAS measures basic skills.  It was not intended to be an indicator of readiness for postsecondary-level work and it does not measure that.  Each year, about a third of our students who have passed MCAS and are admitted to Massachusetts public colleges need to take remedial courses before qualifying for placement in classes where they will earn credit toward a degree.  An ACT study found that 91% of teachers believe students are graduating from high schools ready to do college- level work.  Yet, only 26% of college educators agreed.  Three out of four college teachers believe that students arrived on campus unprepared.  Similarly, employers lament the lack of work readiness skills that they see in job applicants and employees at every level of educational attainment.  So while Massachusetts may have the best average test scores in the nation, we still haven’t quite gotten it right.

Before MBAE was prepared to endorse the Common Core State Standards, we commissioned a thorough, non-ideological comparison of the current Massachusetts standards and the Common Core to assess whether adoption of Common Core would move us forward.  This study, conducted by WestEd, an independent national education research agency, found that there is more in common than not between Massachusetts’ current academic standards and the Common Core; and both sets of standards are high.  With substantial alignment in both math and English, and comparable clarity and rigor, the Common Core can be assessed with at least the same reliability and validity as our current MCAS-based assessment system. (Links to the complete report and related documents can be found here.)

We also examined how the two sets of standards compared in areas where we know our students needed to do better.  WestEd found that the Common Core placed a greater emphasis on standards that focus on strategic thinking and that this focus began in earlier grades.  The Common Core also favors depth rather than breadth and includes standards for literacy skills in areas other than literature.  The Common Core will encourage the development of skills in understanding and communicating technical information and the kinds of arguments made in the political arena.  Assessment tools that measure achievement of these skills will bring us closer to answering the right questions than MCAS currently does. 

The challenge of implementing the Common Core State Standards and of developing tools to measure their achievement presents Massachusetts with an exciting opportunity for collaboration and innovation.   MBAE and the Rennie Center are hosting these forums to help meet that challenge. 

These forums are made possible thanks to the generosity of Fidelity Investments, Intel, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation and the Evaluation Systems Group of Pearson.  We are grateful for their support.