Common Core advocacy research is hit and miss

Disclaimer; I am not a statistician. But, it doesn’t take a whole lot of IQ points to see the advocacy research used to support Common Core(CC) is all over the place and has little consistency.

Take William Schmidt’s research on the alignment of CC math to those of the states and high performing countries. It doesn’t line up with the research currently released by The Center for Public Education, Change The Equation. In the report it claims which states have math graduation requirements that align with CC. The message is that states need to get on it and offer “common core worthy” diplomas.

One would assume that the states Schmidt’s research found to have close alignment to CC would be closer to this end game. In fact, only four out of 16 states he found to be “most like” CC are fully aligned several years after their adoption. The other 14 states he considered to be “most like” CC, are either not aligned or only partially aligned. This may not be of any huge significance, but it’s odd that those states he claimed were so like CC are struggling to change their standards to meet it.

What really shocked me, was that the five states with the highest percent of advanced level math students on NAEP were all NOT aligned with CC according to the Change the Equation report. Are they hesitant to abandon the standards that put them on top and dread the long road down to align to CC standards?

Like I said, I’m not a statistician, but I’m surprised this research gets so much attention as it explains very little with poor methodology.