When individual states implement new educational standards they are likely to take different approaches, and these different approaches can present challenges for educators and contribute to widely varying experiences with the same standards.
It was this truth that Graduate School of Education assistant professor Elizabeth Leisy Stosich, Ed.D., and her colleague Emily Hodge, Ph.D. discovered and eventually wrote about in their recent article, “Accountability, Alignment, and Coherence: How Educators Made Sense of Complex Policy Environments in the Common Core Era,” in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
Stosich and Hodge met while working separately on their dissertations, and quickly realized they had a mutual interest in studying how educators were implementing the Common Core standards. After a number of conversations about their individual studies, they began to recognize, as an example, a big contrast in standards implementation between New York and Florida. New York had taken many steps to align assessments and teacher evaluation policies with the new standards; Florida was still using an outdated test that conflicted with the new standards, yet still holding teachers accountable for student success on the test as part of their professional evaluations.
It was then that the now professors decided to combine their data to help better understand how these state differences contributed to educators’ experiences with the new standards, and how larger district and state contexts influenced educators’ work with the standards. Stosich was particularly focused on how various policies interact. She explains, “Teachers and leaders are rarely, if ever, faced with just one policy to implement. Instead, they must consider a policy, such as new standards, in light of other coordinated (and sometimes conflicting) policies.”
Further, Stosich notes that strengthening students’ educational opportunities and outcomes is incredibly complex and no single reform is likely to lead to major improvements. While acknowledging that the Common Core standards have been controversial, she believes it is valuable to develop clear and coordinated policies for what students should know and be able to do (the academic standards). In her words, “making high-quality curriculum, assessments and professional learning available that align with academic expectations represents an important foundation for our educational system.” She adds, “From there, teachers still have a great deal of work to do in determining how best to support their unique students. In my view, ambitious standards are too often paired with limited support for educators as they learn how to shift practice and curriculum to support students in successfully achieving the standards. Thus, educators often fall short of the expectations set by new standards.”
Recently, the National Education Policy Center, a university research center housed at the University of Colorado – Boulder School of Education, released a brief
to amplify the findings from Stosich and Hodge’s study. The brief presented the following five “lessons learned” relevant to practitioners as well as policymakers in their article:
- To change standards, you also need to change curricula;
- Changing curricula (on its own) is not sufficient;
- Order of operations matters (timeline of implementation);
- Not so fast: When multiple policy changes are introduced at once, districts and schools need time to help teachers implement the new approaches; and
- Policy changes are not “one and done”: instead, they require ongoing attention to on-the-ground experiences with implementation, especially when multiple changes are introduced at the same time.
And Stosich believes these lessons still hold true, even though much of the change in standards were first adopted in the 2010s, because states continue to shift standards in large and small ways. “Thus,” she states, “responding effectively to academic standards remains an ongoing challenge for teachers and leaders. Educators need time to engage in the deep learning necessary to make meaningful changes to their practice, and they need this time before new assessments are introduced.”
Stosich concludes, “More recently, many schools and districts are moving to implement culturally responsive-sustaining curriculum and pedagogy. Yet, they are doing so with very limited guidance from policymakers. Lessons from the challenges educators faced in learning to teach to the Common Core suggest that more detailed guidance, aligned curriculum materials, and intensive and sustained professional learning are needed if we want to ensure students have access to meaningful culturally responsive-sustaining educational experiences.”
