A 2008 report offered a dire warning: U.S. schools were falling behind their international peers. Its prescription: states should “adopt a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts.”
The idea of the Common Core would soon gain steam. Thanks to interest from state leaders and financial incentives offered by the federal government and private philanthropies, most states adopted new academic standards over the next few years. That would soon mean new tests, new textbooks, and new teaching methods — and in many places, backlash to those changes.
But amid the fierce debates, there has been virtually no research on whether the standards were actually accomplishing their goal of improving student learning.
