Three key coverage lessons from coverage of education’s last major policy controversy.

 

Common Core began with great promise: broad popular support, the endorsement of policy elites from both parties, boatloads of cash from governmental and philanthropic sources, and adoption by 45 states within a few months of the standards’ June 2010 release.

And yet, more than a decade later, the best-designed study of Common Core’s impact on student achievement found only small, negative effects. No study has documented positive gains that rise to the level of either statistical or practical real world significance.

My recent book, Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core, attempts to describe what happened to that bold initiative.

Media coverage of Common Core followed an arc that mirrored the policy’s fate: perhaps too optimistic at the beginning, but after a few years of documenting the standards’ choppy implementation, a more realistic view of the reform emerged.

I’m no education journalist, but there are some valuable lessons here for the next time a major policy proposal is being presented and adopted: maintain a healthy skepticism, suspend judgment until evidence of outcomes appears, and do not let the assumptions of major policies go unchallenged.

Under the radar

Common Core initially flew under the media radar.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess conducted a Lexis/Nexis search of U.S. media mentions of “Common Core” from 2009 to 2011. He found 4,500 mentions, fewer than the 5,500 mentions the term “vouchers” attracted in a single year (2011).

The lack of attention was somewhat by design. The secrecy surrounding Common Core’s drafting had been unprecedented in the history of standards. Common Core’s developers wanted to avoid repeating the failure of national standards in the 1990s, when sharp divisions between progressive and traditional educators undermined implementation.

Common Core’s developers sought to placate the two sides by including standards appealing to each. A right-left coalition helped tamp down partisan attacks. For a while, the strategy worked. With the combination of bipartisan support and little public scrutiny coming from popular media, Common Core enjoyed smooth sailing. Indeed, a 2013 Education Next survey revealed that supporters of Common Core outnumbered opponents 64% to 13%.

Ominously, however, the PDK/Gallup poll of the same year reported 62% of the public said they had never heard of Common Core and one-third of those who had heard of the standards admitted they did not know much about them.

Tamping down coverage of Common Core may have helped foster the impression of public support, but the true test of the standards would come when they materialized in schools as curriculum and instruction — and as assessments that drive accountability systems.

Political opposition grows

Public opposition to Common Core appeared first on social media and conservative talk radio (e.g., Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin).

A watershed moment for opposition on the right came in 2012 when Tony Bennett, Indiana superintendent of public instruction and a rising star in the Republican Party, was defeated for re-election by a school teacher and political novice, Glenda Ritz.

On the left, serious opposition first appeared in New York. The state scheduled its first Common Core assessment in 2013, and when the scores were released in August, they were abysmal. Statewide, only 31% passed the exams in reading and math.

The tests were terrible for Common Core politically. Technical glitches poisoned the brand in several states, teacher support collapsed when the tests came out, and — most damning of all –they labeled 60-70% of kids as failing. No test that does that survives if it’s tied to consequential accountability. Ever.

By the middle of the decade, things came crashing down for Common Core. Parent opposition grew. States began pulling out or renaming their standards. Media scrutiny intensified.

Lessons for covering future school reforms

Having been a classroom teacher, college professor, and think tank researcher, I would like to offer three lessons that journalists can take from the Common Core experience.

Lesson 1: Avoid credulous early coverage

Early coverage of Common Core adoption and implementation was relentlessly superficial and upbeat.

As Common Core was rolled out to schools and classrooms, reporters visited schools and filed stories describing what was going on in classrooms. That reporting produced some excellent stories and provided context for the standards’ on-the ground impact. It is an approach that comes with limitations, however. Similar to the criticism of embedded reporters’ coverage of the Iraq War, education reporters are not invited into randomly selected classrooms.

It is unknown whether the observed lessons are representative of teachers’ experiences across the nation — or even in a single state, district, or school. Reporters are allowed into classrooms by educators with an interest in how reforms are presented in the press, introducing the potential for stories with unwarranted optimism.

Numerous press accounts described classrooms filled with happy, active children engaged in problem solving and critical thinking, a welcome relief from the dreary old days of lectures, memorization, and rote learning.

An unfortunate number of articles simply interviewed local educators who supported Common Core and read like advertisements for the standards.

Lesson 2: Question official explanations

Like all top-down school reforms, the words constituting standards are interpreted by several people before reaching the classroom. Much of the early coverage described the hefty demands the new standards placed on teachers, with headlines such as “Common Core standards bring dramatic changes to elementary school math.”

Professional development is one of the primary tools of implementation. A 2014 Hechinger Report described a two-day workshop in which the main presenter urged teachers to place students in small groups and to allow them to struggle and stumble “without much guidance.” The presenter also recommended that “successful Common Core math be 65% student-led and 35% teacher-led.”

The advice is unfounded. Nowhere in the standards does Common Core recommend teaching students in small groups or withholding explicit instruction when students are struggling. As for the 65-35 division of student- and teacher-led instruction, the presenter was expressing a pedagogical philosophy, not a recommendation grounded in research or endorsed by Common Core.

Lesson 3: Pursue the details of implementation

An early controversy with the standards involved the balance of fiction and nonfiction in English language arts. Common Core’s ELA standards recommend a 50-50 split in the elementary grades, with the nonfiction portion rising to about 70% in high school. The purpose of the recommendation is to encourage greater use of reading materials promoting content knowledge. Common Core’s critics charged that literature was being pushed out of the curriculum.

The 70-30 division was meant to be shared by math, science, history, and all the other high school subjects, Common Core’s defenders argued, not just English classes.

Education Week’s Catherine Gewertz was among those reporters who didn’t take official explanations without questioning them. In one of her pieces, she quoted a teacher who pointed out that English teachers, not science or history teachers, are held responsible if reading scores drop.

She also noted, “I certainly didn’t hear much about the intensive training being offered for teachers of all these subjects to transform their practice. Or any written guidance on that distribution of effort.”

Anyone who’s familiar with high schools knows that coordinating instructional materials across different subjects is extremely difficult. Anyone who’s familiar with the research on teacher training knows that successful programs are rare, even when designed to improve the teaching of history by history teachers, science by science teachers, and so on—let alone training out-of-subject teachers to teach literacy.

The impression took root that no one had thought through the details of implementing Common Core.

Lessons for future coverage

Standards are aspirational; like diets or savings plans, they sound great all the way up to the moment when favorite foods have to be avoided or money set aside for the future rather than spent on a nice evening out or a much-needed vacation.

Common Core followed the same trajectory as No Child Left Behind and the national standards projects of the 1990s.

They enjoyed their greatest popularity on the day they were written, and then, as the substance of the reforms became apparent, support began to wane.

That’s probably the most important lesson for journalists to remember when the next big education reform comes along.

Previously on the same topic:

Common Core, automated advocacy, & media coverage

Common problems with Common Core reporting (in the Columbia Journalism Review)

NYT’s Mass. Testing Story Contradicted By Other Outlets, Appears To Overstate Decision

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Tom Loveless

TOM LOVELESS is the author of the just-published book, Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core. He served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution from 1999 to 2014. In the 1980s, he taught 6th grade in the San Juan Unified School District in Sacramento and from 1992 to 1999, he taught at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. You can follow him at @tomloveless99.