Americans who have long doubted the Common Core in English and Math may have been right all along as the country sees historic drops in Math and Reading scores since Common Core started in 2009 at the beginning of former President Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House.
The decline in American reading and math scores also sparks another debate on deciding if the Federal Government should remove itself from their role in education, and therefore return the responsibility back to local control.
The latest study by Pioneer Institute tracked the slow progress and declining scores among Americans, looking back to years ago when they really dug in and implemented Common Core.
It’s stated that fourth and eighth grade scores were actually rising in the years leading up to common core. Now it’s the opposite. The years after Common Core shows the same grade levels declining at the same, or similar, rate as they were once rising.
Some of the biggest declines are showing for the most vulnerable students. It states that the further they were behind, the more they continued to decline. They struggled to improve. It said, specifically, “the declines are most acute for the lowest-achieving students, increasing inequality. Scores for students at the 90th percentile have mostly continued their pre-Common Core trend of gradual improvement. But the farther behind students were, the more substantial the declines, with the biggest drops occurring for those at the 25th and 10th percentiles.”
Does this mean the fears and complaints about Common Core have been right all along? Many teachers and parents alike have complained for years that Common Core takes simple problems and turns them into unnecessary and lengthy problems where people spend way too long to solve a single problem.
For scores to continue declining since the inception of the Common Core speaks volumes. It was like they took something simple and not broken, and tried to fix it by making it more difficult and too many steps.
For more insight, the study suggests that “from 2003 to 2013, national fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores were increasing at an average of about half of a point each year. Since 2013, fourth-grade reading scores have been falling by less than half of a point each year, while eighth-grade scores have dropped by nearly a full point a year.”
When school returns for the next year, this is something that administrators, teachers, and parents should think about when they decide how to proceed and if they should finally get rid of Common Core entirely.
