Does the Common Core Dictate Instructional Methods?

In this feisty Education Gadfly article, Michael Petrilli responds to recent articles criticizing supporters of the Common Core for going back on their initial claim that the new standards won’t prescribe how content is taught in classrooms. Petrilli and others have said that Common Core will bring about important “instructional shifts,” and the critics are saying, Aha! Your loose-tight paradigm was disingenuous! This really is about dictating how teachers teach! 

To which Petrilli responds, “Dude, guys, get a grip. Are we hoping that Common Core will lead to instructional change in the classroom? Hell yes! If ‘instructional change’ isn’t what we’re all working toward, through any of our reform efforts, what’s the point? How else do we expect to see improved student achievement?

“The main reason there’s been so little achievement gain over the past few decades arising from the reforms that so many of us have been pressing is precisely because neither curriculum nor instruction much changed – hence the students’ actual classroom experience didn’t much change, and hence the students didn’t learn much more… We believe that schools will do better on the Common Core-aligned assessments if they ask students to read challenging texts, rather than books that are relatively easy for them.

“But guess what? If schools continue to assign kids ‘just right’ texts at their current reading levels and those kids still pass the Common Core assessments – great! From the perspective of the public, that’s what counts. But if we see a lot of failure on the Common Core assessments in 2015 and 2016 and little movement on NAEP, we’ll now have a reasonable hypothesis to explain it: Schools didn’t change their instructional practices, at least as they relate to assigning students more-challenging texts.”

How do we get local school districts to make smart curriculum decisions? asks Petrilli.  “Set clear standards, align assessments to those standards, hold educators accountable, and help them find solid curricular materials that synch with the standards.” 

“Hell Yes We Want Instructional Change” by Michael Petrilli in The Education Gadfly, Nov. 14, 2013 (Vol. 13, #44), http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-weekly#56348

From the Marshall Memo #511