An op-ed in the Monday edition of USA Today tells us that when states participating in the Common Core education program receive their children's first test results in math and reading, the results should be sobering. The report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute said that parents deserve to know whether their children are learning and whether taxpayers are getting their money's worth.
The organization said that unfortunately, before Common Core, most states were setting a very low bar for their children. They said that the test results for their states could be even worse for the first year of testing.
We bring this up today because Indiana is one of the few states that chose to walk away from Common Core State Standards after being one of the first states to adopt the program.
Common Core is an education program designed by individual states working in concert, and not by the federal government.
Even more interesting, Indiana this year struggled to create its own standards and its own standardized test, instead of relying on Common Core. However, the issue evolved into whether Indiana should count the results of its testing, or not. Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz has argued that Indiana should not count the results of its testing during the first year, the reason being that Indiana students might not be prepared the first year.
However, the state's education leaders and lawmakers countered her argument, maintaining that parents want to know this first year how their students are doing in reading and math, even as their scores drop from past comparisons.
The Common Core commentary in USA Today maintained that the most important step in fixing the problem is to stop lying to ourselves. The authors argue that Common Core should help to boost college readiness by eventually raising expectations.
Let's hope the same is true for Indiana schools, even as new standards prove challenging.