Ashley Joachim & Patrick McGuinn

The Common Core State Standards Initiative was designed to solve a problem that has plagued past standard-setting efforts. Many states responded to earlier efforts by watering down their standards for learning and lowering expectations for students in an attempt to artificially boost the number of students that reached proficiency. By creating a set of common expectations across states, the designers of the Common Core sought to protect the initiative from the inevitable political pressures that might lead policymakers to weaken the standards or the aligned assessments.

However, history may be set to repeat itself. While most states have stood firm in their embrace of the new standards, the number of states planning to use the aligned assessments dropped from 45 in 2011 to 20 by mid-2016.

In a new article in Education Next, we examine why states have abandoned the assessments (designed by the federally funded Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia (SBAC) and Partnership for Assessments of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)) even as they continue to embrace the standards on which the assessments are based. The answer, in short, is politics. It’s easy for policymakers and the public to embrace high standards in principle. But when policymakers seek to hold students, teachers, and schools accountable for those standards by using the results from aligned assessments, support is far more likely to falter.