DOOMED BY ITS OWN SUCCESS:

The call for "higher" standards has been a central tenet of school reform for three decades. In 1983, the blue-ribbon commission report "A Nation at Risk" urged that "schools, colleges, and universities adopt more rigorous and measurable standards." In 1989, President George H. W. Bush hosted a national governors' summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which the governors embraced a series of dramatic goals, including national standards. In 1994, the National Endowment for the Humanities and UCLA drafted voluntary National History Standards. Such efforts were stymied by resistance to extending Washington's reach. (Famously, in 1995 the National History Standards were rejected 99 to 1 by the United States Senate.)

In 1996, the National Governors Association and several prominent CEOs founded Achieve, Inc., a nonprofit devoted to promoting higher state standards. The National Alliance of Business, Business Roundtable, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce all joined the effort to "set tough academic standards that apply to every student in every school." Each of these efforts, however, failed amidst opposition to the expansion of Washington's role in education.

In 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act marked a dramatic win for standards-based reform -- but at the price of abandoning the push for "national" standards. NCLB required states to adopt standards in reading and math, administer annual tests geared to those standards, use tests to determine which students were proficient, and analyze the outcomes to determine which schools and systems were making "adequate yearly progress" -- including the absurd requirement that 100% of students be proficient by 2014. Schools and systems that didn't perform adequately were subject to federally mandated sanctions. The crucial compromise was that states could set their own standards and tests. In fact, NCLB specifically prohibited national testing or a federally controlled curriculum.

What followed was not difficult to anticipate. The possibility of sanctions gave more than a few state leaders reason to adopt easy tests and lower the scores required for proficiency. A "race to the bottom" was soon underway, prompting an effort to combat the gamesmanship.

In December 2008, Achieve, Inc., the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Governors Association issued "Benchmarking for Success," a report that urged states to develop and adopt common standards; called for federal incentives to promote that effort; and advocated aligning textbooks, curricula, and tests to those standards. If all states played by the same rules, there would be no race to the bottom. Encouraged by bipartisan interest in the initiative, the CCSSO and NGA launched the Common Core effort.

Like the standards some states have had for decades and all states have had since NCLB, the Common Core is a checklist for what K-12 students should know in English Language Arts and math. The mantra of the Common Core effort was "fewer, clearer, higher" -- meaning that the standards would include less minutiae, be more explicit about what students should learn, and set more demanding expectations. The authors of the Common Core took care to spell out the functional skills that students were expected to learn in each grade. For instance, the Common Core ELA standards require that third graders be able to "[r]ead grade-level prose and poetry orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings." Eighth graders are expected to "[c]ompare and contrast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the differing structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style." The math standards require first graders to be able to "[o]rganize, represent, and interpret data with up to three categories; ask and answer questions about the total number of data points, how many in each category, and how many more or less are in one category than in another." Students in high-school algebra are expected to "[s]olve simple rational and radical equations in one variable, and give examples showing how extraneous solutions may arise."

Common Core advocates billed the standards as "internationally benchmarked," "evidence-based," "college- and career-ready," and "rigorous." The truth was something less than advertised. The claims were not so much false as grossly overstated. For instance, "internationally benchmarked" actually meant no more than that the committees that wrote the Common Core standards looked at the standards in countries that score well on international tests. Advocates don't even claim that the Common Core mimicked these standards, just that they consulted them. Marina Ratner of the University of California, Berkeley, has argued, "The Common Core fails any comparison with the standards of high-achieving countries."

The "evidence-based" claim implies that decisions about why students must learn this and not that in a given grade are backed by scientific research. In fact, what advocates mean is that the authors of the standards looked at research and surveys asking professors and hiring managers what they thought high-school graduates should know and which courses college-bound students usually take. But the impact of this research is hard to discern. Vanderbilt education professor Lynn Fuchs has put it well, noting there is no "empirical basis" for the Common Core: "We don't know yet whether it makes sense to have this particular set of standards."

When advocates claim the Common Core ensures that students are "college- and career-ready," it is again worth reading the fine print. Achieve, Inc., one of the progenitors of the standards, explains that they are designed to make sure that students can pass "entry-level, credit-bearing postsecondary coursework" in "community college, university, technical/vocational program[s], apprenticeship[s], or significant on-the-job training." This is something less than the recipe for excellence that advocates tend to suggest. And while advocates declare that the Common Core is more rigorous than previous state standards, this is a difficult claim to referee. More often than not, the case rests on the subjective judgment of four evaluators hired by the pro-Common Core Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2010, who opined that the new standards were better than about three-quarters of existing state standards. Not an unreasonable judgment, but hardly compelling proof of rigor. The standards appeared perfectly passable, but claims about their remarkable virtue were gross exaggerations.

In any event, the standards were not adopted by states after deliberate evaluation or public consideration of their merits. Rather, incentives from the Obama administration encouraged states to hurriedly embrace the Common Core. In 2009, with funding from the nearly $800 billion federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama administration created a $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" program in which states could compete for federal funding by promising to fulfill certain requirements. As legislated by Congress, the funds that fueled Race to the Top were intended to help states "enhance the quality of [their] academic assessments" and "take steps to improve [their] academic content standards." In the hands of the Obama Department of Education, that became a requirement that states competing for Race to the Top dollars pledge to adopt "college- and career-ready" standards. The Education Department made it clear that the surest way to meet that requirement was to adopt the Common Core and to promise to use one of the federally funded, Common Core-aligned tests.

The Obama administration went on to propose pressing states to use the Common Core in its blueprint for reauthorizing No Child Left Behind and to do so when it decided to issue waivers from NCLB's fast-approaching (if ludicrous) 100% proficiency requirement. By the end of 2010, 39 states had adopted the Common Core, and by the end of 2011, 44 states had. Advocates cheered the administration's push for the Common Core, insisting there was no time to worry about the niceties of federalism. As school-reform firebrand Michelle Rhee put it, "I've heard some recent rumblings from folks who say we don't like it when the federal government is telling us what to do....You know what you should not like? The fact that China is kicking our butts right now."

Despite this track record, the administration and its allies dismissed fears of federal encroachment as unfounded. Speaking about the standards, Education Secretary Duncan told the American Society of News Editors in 2013, "The federal government didn't write them, didn't approve them and doesn't mandate them. And we never will. Anyone who says otherwise is either misinformed or willfully misleading." Advocates have echoed the administration line, lamenting that critics have "politicized" an apolitical enterprise. This complaint would be more convincing if Democrats hadn't already eagerly taken credit for the standards, with the 2012 Democratic National Platform applauding Obama for the widespread adoption of the Common Core and the president crediting himself in his 2011 and 2013 State of the Union remarks for the same thing. The studied disingenuousness of devotees would fuel backlash among skeptics who saw steady federal encroachment and believed the Common Core was sold under false pretenses.

The ambiguities surrounding the Common Core helped the standards gain momentum, and the resulting hurried adoption left little time to sort things out. No one quite understood what Common Core was or what its impact would be, allowing it to be all things to all people. This meant supporters could credit it with diverse and sometimes contradictory virtues. For instance, proponents of "21st-century skills" were pleased that the Common Core valued having students explain their math work even when they couldn't determine the right answer, while others lauded the standards' heightened focus on arithmetic. Union leaders hailed the Common Core as a welcome opportunity for teachers nationwide to throw off the "stifling" strictures of old state standards and focus on more "authentic" learning, while reformers cheered the promise of more difficult tests that would push teachers to ensure student mastery of tested skills.

Despite the Common Core's rapid, widespread adoption, it received surprisingly little attention in the mainstream media. A LexisNexis search shows that, between 2009 and 2011, as more than 40 states with more than 40 million students signed on, all American news outlets combined featured fewer than 4,500 mentions of the Common Core. In 2011 alone, by comparison, school vouchers -- which affected fewer than 200,000 students -- received more than 5,500 mentions. That media silence was due in large part to a calculated strategy among Common Core supporters: Advocates took pains to stay under the radar, avoid public debate, tightly coordinate their messaging, ridicule skeptics rather than respond to them, and ride the wave of support provided by the Obama administration in those years.

The ease of the Common Core's early success was at once astonishing and unsurprising. It was astonishing because previous efforts to promote national educational standards had ended terribly, and after those experiences, any talk of national standards was generally dismissed as a pipe dream. But it was also unsurprising because the Common Core standards didn't seem to offer much cause for opposition. The standards were simply a list of recommendations for what K-12 students should learn in reading and math. Earlier setbacks had taught proponents to stay away from history or social studies, to avoid identifying which books or authors students should read, and to cling to the safe ground of "skill-based" standards. Amidst a housing crash, a bitter recession, and ferocious fights over health care and the proper size of government, quiet changes to reading and math standards were easy to overlook.

But the wins produced by a stealth strategy that bypassed a distracted public turned out to be unsustainable. Once the public started to pay attention, and the advocates' carefully crafted talking points were exposed to the harsh reality of implementation, support for the Common Core began to unravel.

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