American Educational Research Association report: Common Core NOT based on Indiana’s former standards

The new Indiana standards closely, if not identically, resemble the Common Core standards they are intended to replace. The Indiana Department of Education(IDOE) and the Center for Education and Career Innovation(CECI) have responded to this complaint by claiming the Common Core was based on Indiana’s former standards, thus when using these sets of standards to compile new standards the similarity was unavoidable. However, they have refused to perform a formal analysis to compare the two sets of standards and available research indicates otherwise.

At the State Board of Education vote on the new standards Deputy Assistant Superintendent, Danielle Shockey, explained to the board that the Chief Council of State School Officers(CCSSO) and the National Governors Association(NGA) took existing standards into consideration when they wrote the Common Core. When you “pull back the onion on CCS,” Shockey said, “much of the Common Core Standards were Indiana’s standards in part.”

State Board member David Freitas asked her for clarification, “So in summary what your saying is the Indiana standards came before the Common Core standards and Common Core actually adopted some of the Indiana standards, and now its coming full circle and we are getting them back? After explaining that some content is universal to any set of standards, Shockey replied, “Yes, essentially that is what we are saying.”

If that were true, wouldn’t our new standards look like our old standards? You can view the 2006 English standards here and the 2006 math standards here.  The documents from our former, pre-Common Core standards don’t look like the new ones. Yes, some content is universal and applies to any set of standards, but the treatment of the content in the language used is very different between sets, this is what makes some standards better than others. All standards cover addition, subtraction, etc., but that doesn’t mean all standards are the same and based on one another.

She was correct in one part of her statement. In June 2010, the CCSSO and NGA did analyze states’ standards and the final Common Core standards. They convened 35 math and English specialists and content experts to analyze the content in each standard and coded each one by content and objective.

That data was used by Professor Andrew Porter to explained how state standards aligned with the Common Core and was published by the American Educational Research Association. The report found the Common Core Standards had very little alignment to our former 2006 math and English standards as indicated in the table from his report below:

Table 1

Alignment of State and Common Core Math Standards

Indiana	K	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9-12
Math	0.25	0.26	0.34	0.27	0.29	0.27	0.26	0.26	0.26	0.25
English	0.36	0.29	0.26	0.33	0.35	0.21	0.36	0.30	0.33	0.35

Does it seem possible that the Common Core Standards were based on our former standards when there is such low alignment? Shouldn’t someone be calling the IDOE and CECI out for reporting information that clearly can’t be substantiated by the available research? IF they have evidence to prove otherwise, it is well past the time for them to present it.