The Anchor Standards

The root of many problems in the Common Core Standards

There are a few basic premises in the Common Core ELA/Literacy standards for Reading:

• There is a fairly short set of discrete skills necessary to be “college and career ready” in the domain of English Language Arts and literacy (across content areas).
• Text complexity can be objectively measured on a single scale.
• The development of those skills is essentially linear, that is, through progressive improvement of variations on the same skills at less sophisticated levels, from kindergarten onwards.
• The skills must be demonstrated with appropriate sophistication on texts of a specific complexity.

Let’s assume, for the moment, that these premises are true.

It certainly makes it easier to design a valid and reliable literacy assessment. You need a set of texts covering the relevant range of measured complexity. You need tasks (in whatever form is practically feasible) covering some or all of the relevant skills, ideally spanning a range of sophistication above and below the relative complexity of the text.

With a computer-adaptive assessment system, then all you need to do is start a student with a reading prompt and questions around the level you think he or she is already at, and then depending on how the student does, move onto another reading of higher or lower complexity, if you want more detail, including varying the sophistication of tasks relating to specific skills, until you have produced a score with a high degree of precision and confidence.

Once you’ve got that, you’ve got a solid foundation for all kinds of growth-based assessments of teachers and schools, the efficacy of different curricula and different interventions, in essence, a revolution in data!

That’s how Race to the Top was supposed to work, with the Common Core at its center. If you don’t believe me, you might read this post by the CTO of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. It is all rather straightforward.

Much criticism has been directed at the premises outlined above, including the underlying premise that college and career readiness is the fundamental goal of primary and secondary education. This criticism is all appropriate and necessary. However, this structure is also the source of many redundancies, contradictions and sources of confusion within the standards themselves, which also deserve attention.

The problem with CCSSI’s approach is that essentially nobody actually believes that drawing out the college and career readiness standards, also known as anchor standards, across 13 years of school is sufficient. Everyone wants to add things if they can. It also demands that the anchor standards be just right, as any error or inefficiency will be magnified across all grade levels and text types in every textbook, evaluation system and classroom across participating states.

Let’s pause to consider the process by which the standards were written. One team of 14, heavy on representatives of testing companies, wrote the anchor standards and sent them out for public comment. In fact, five of the 14 working group members were senior level executives of ACT, The College Board, or Achieve, who worked on both the ELA/Literacy and Math working groups, and who were the current superiors of five of the remaining 9 working group members from ACT, The College Board or Achieve. Working group member David Coleman, subsequently leveraged his public position as the putative “architect” of the standards to become President and CEO of The College Board. Coming into the process, ACT, The College Board and Achieve all sponsored competing versions of their own college readiness standards. The first draft of ELA/Literacy anchor standards was released in September 2009.

In November 2009, the 50 person K-12 working group for the K-12 standards was formed. Of the 50, only 8 had participated as relatively junior members of the anchor standards group. Overall, it is a much more diverse group, including more academics and some actual teachers. The scope of this group’s work would be tightly constrained by the anchor standards: picture sitting in a conference room trying to decide what to put down for the third grade literature version of “CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.6 Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text” while still having “limited repetition across the grades or grade spans,” but also clearly representing the underlying skill, and you have to go over fifty more before you can fly home for the weekend. Somebody better get more coffee.

Four months after its public announcement, the K-12 group released a substantially revised version of the anchor standards and a full set of hundreds of grade level standards across the domains of ELA/Literacy. The final version of the complete K-12 standards was released just three months after the first draft in June 2010, with relatively minor revision in Reading.

The point of recapitulating this history is to remind us that not only is standards making always a multifaceted political process representing a multitude of competing interests, but that these standards were developed in a big hurry. There simply was not enough time to do the job right. It is easy and seductive to slip into seeing these standards as a conspiracy of like-minded evil geniuses, but that runs the risk of giving the standards too much credit for quality and consistency.

Once more the English and literacy experts and teachers were included in the grade level working group, they stretched the rigid skill-based anchor standard system as much as possible, introducing multiple text types, disciplinary literacy, and mixing grade-specific content throughout the skill-based grade level standards. In a rush to finish and marshal the necessary coalition, without time or authority to reconsider or modify the anchor standard model, the Common Core ELA/Literacy standards became a repetitive, redundant, and error ridden mess, particularly compared to the curricula of the high performing provinces and countries we’re supposed to be competing against.

Documenting extent of the specific annoyances is the subject of this collection.