Another day, another failed promise from Common Core. Education Dive reports that U.S. 4th-graders scores have dipped on a recent international literacy assessment.
In the years since most states have adopted the Common Core standards, reading achievement has declined among America’s 4th-graders, both in terms of the average score as well as in comparison to their peers in other countries, according to the results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) announced today.
U.S. 4th-graders scored an average of 549, which is still close to a “high” score of 550 on the 0-1,000 scale, but is seven points lower than in 2011, the last time PIRLS results were released. The average U.S. score was behind 12 other countries, ahead of 30 countries, and about the same as 15.
Moreover, excuses are plentiful, such as, the controversy has hampered our efforts!
But Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and one of the authors of the standards, says even though the standards are in effect in 42 states, the ongoing controversy surrounding them has hampered efforts to make the changes in curriculum, assessment, teacher preparation and other areas of education needed to see a jump in reading performance at the national level.
Also, we need better curriculum!
“We have yet to see any kind of concerted national or federal effort towards improving curriculum and instruction in ways that are aligned to these new standards,” he added. “There definitely have been moves towards this locally, but those are piecemeal and sporadic and given that, it will take a while before you will see any kind of national movement in performance due to them.”
Followed up with the shallow promise that “quality curriculum” is on the way… THEN we will see results!
Susan Pimentel, a lead writer of the CCSS for ELA and a founding partner at Student Achievement Partners, added that high-quality curriculum materials aligned to the standards are just now reaching the market and that teachers are still learning how to change their practices to help students meet the standards.
Excuses, excuses….
These 4th-graders, for the most part, have been under Common Core since Kindergarten. If Common Core is all that it is cracked up to be, we should have seen an increase in scores, not a decline.
However, it is not, it was a dataless reform, and the current data is showing us it is a miserable failure.
Lisa M says
An experiment on an entire nation of children. What will become of these millions of children when it is finally decided that the experiment didn’t work out as planned? A lot of already rich people will be a whole lot richer, the middle class will dwindle, and we will have more poverty and crime than we will know what to do with. But that’s OK….because the prison system is becoming privatized and more prisoners, means those rich people that hold the contracts with the prison systems will get richer again. Greed rules our country. I can see a “Hunger Games” type scenario in the near future.