When state legislators created a new commission last summer to review North Carolina’s participation in Common Core standards for elementary and secondary schools, they made an excellent decision.
While setting high academic expectations for our students and assessing their performance with rigorous, independent tests are good ideas, the Common Core project did not successfully implement them. Some of its standards are faulty and the upcoming Common Core exams appear to be extraordinarily expensive. North Carolina can and should do better.
However, when the General Assembly set up the new panel in 2013 to review, revise, and replace the Common Core standards, lawmakers forgot an important detail: an appropriation to fund its operations. The Academic Standards Review Commission has had several meetings. But without funding for support staff or analysis, it hasn’t made much progress in carrying out its mission.
Fortunately, that’s about to change. As Barry Smith reported in Carolina Journal, legislative leaders have agreed to fast-track an appropriation when the 2015 session begins in January. In the meantime, the commission can draw on some funds from the Department of Administration, where it is housed.
It’s important to understand that while some of the original Common Core standards were developmentally inappropriate, and the federal government’s role in “encouraging” North Carolina and others to adopt them has been opaque and heavy-handed, simply repealing them and defaulting to North Carolina’s previous standards and examinations is not an adequate response to the situation.
Education reformers have already had decades of experience with North Carolina education officials making such decisions. That experience has been mostly bad. North Carolina has repeatedly set low expectations, published questionable curricula, and mismanaged a state testing program that sometimes seem intended more to generate good headlines rather than to challenge North Carolina’s schools and students to improve.
So we should neither stay where we are nor go back to where we were. That’s why the work of the Academic Standards Review Commission is so important. It should seek out and adopt the clearest and most rigorous academic standards any state has ever produced. These standards should then be translated into an effective curriculum for school districts to implement — although districts, schools, and teachers ought to be given the authority to decide how best to implement that curriculum through instructional practices in the classroom.
As for assessment, North Carolina public schools should administer statistically valid, independently produced, competitively priced standardized tests that allow for national or even international comparisons. There are plenty of options out there. In fact, the state has already taken several steps in the right direction by using the ACT and its affiliated tests to measure performance in North Carolina’s middle and high schools. It is impossible for any state politician or bureaucrat to fiddle with the ACT. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Setting high standards and producing useful performance data may be necessary elements of any serious strategy for education reform, but they are not sufficient. Parents should have a broader array of school choices. Decisions about hiring, supervising, rewarding, and firing teachers should be devolved as much as possible to districts and schools. We should embrace innovative ideas and applications of new technologies in education, as long as they are subjected to evaluation for results — either by value-added test scores or by parental choice.
I also think it would be wise to clarify North Carolina’s education governance by, for example, reshaping the State Board of Education so that the governor and legislature share the authority to appoint its members, who in turn hire the state superintendent of public instruction. However, education reformers shouldn’t expect such a change in governance to produce massive improvements in school operations or student achievement. Higher standards, better tests, school autonomy, and parental choice are higher priorities.
When the General Assembly reconvenes in January, lawmakers should quickly approve funding for the Academic Standards Review Commission so it can complete its work as soon as possible. At best, Common Core was a distraction. In practice, it’s been a costly detour. It’s time for North Carolina to get back on track with education reform.
John Hood is chairman of the John Locke Foundation.