Rigor of the State Standards Doesn’t Correlate With Student Achievement

Ramesh Ponnuru makes an excellent point in his op/ed at Bloomberg:

For that matter, how common will that core really be? Classroom practice doesn’t always reflect the standards written in a state’s official documents. That’s one reason the rigor of state standards doesn’t correlate with student achievement. But ensuring uniformity in practice would require the kind of heavy-handed central governing body that supporters of the Common Core strenuously deny they want.

The real problem with the Common Core is not that it represents Big Brother in the classroom, but that it seems unlikely to do much to increase the amount of learning that students do. Perhaps that’s because there’s not much that can be done on the national level to make K-12 schooling better.

I don’t agree with everything he said in his column, but he is spot on in his statement that the rigor of state standards doesn’t correlate with student achievement.  I’ve been stating much the same for the last three years.  Changing state standards is not a silver bullet approach to raising student achievement and bring about education reform.  There’s absolutely no evidence that shows centralizing education around a set of standards will increase student achievement and yet we’re told that the Common Core is the cure for what ails public education.  Shoot it’ll even lower the juvenile crime rate.

Please.