Educator Challenges Common Core Critics

Teacher and author Dave Stuart Jr. says the way through the Common Core debate starts with one question: what is a school trying to produce? In this 2014 interview, Stuart described how he handled the standards in his own classroom and what school leaders can take from it.

Start with the student you want to produce

“Start with a single question: what is it that we are trying to produce as a school?” Stuart said. He asks schools to describe that ideal student, with her skills and habits, as simply as they can: “in my workshops, I ask participants to boil it down to a sentence.” Only then does he turn to the standards, asking how they line up with that aim and where they differ.

For the Common Core, he found the aim plain. “Over 100 times, they repeat the phrase ‘college and career readiness,'” he said. Rather than “drowning teachers in the minutiae of the standards,” he would start with that big picture and ask, “Can we be for that?” In his words: “I don’t know of a school that’s not interested in preparing students to earn a living — hopefully every school aims at more than that, too, but the standards help us with the earning a living part.”

Both the granular and the global view

Stuart said schools need two lenses at once: “we need both granular and global lenses if we’re to persist in, first of all, simply doing this work, and, secondly, doing the right work.” Too many teachers, he said, “are lost (and stressed out) in a granular-only mindset.” Keeping the wider view is hard, but “the outcome, in other words, is worth the difficulty.”

Clarity and positive intentions

For teachers who want better conversations with school leaders, his advice was “Clarity, clarity, clarity.” Educational talk, he said, “often drowns in fuzzy thinking adorned with buzzwords,” so teachers should be clear about what they seek to produce and look for common ground with others. His second tip: “remember that no one got into education to do a bad job. Presume positive intentions.”

A vision that outlasts the next policy

On how administrators can announce school-wide policy to staff wary of constant change, Stuart pointed to whole-building vision work: “Our schools need to have visions that transcend the tests of time.” In his own classroom he asks, “What can I do today that will help my students the most? How does this tie into yesterday’s work? Last week’s? Next month’s?” Questions like these, he said, “take us out of reactionary mode.” He urged administrators to “be brave and have faith” and to resist the fear “that if we’re not pounding kids with test prep then the test is going to get us. That’s not true.”

Finding and growing teacher leaders

If he were an administrator, Stuart said, he would keep “a draft spectrum of teachers in my building”: those at the low end “would be getting remediated or worked toward leaving the building; those on the high end need to become teacher leaders.” In his view, “Being a teacher leader isn’t just about serving your school; it’s about putting yourself in situations that push and sharpen you.” When his own administrators asked him to lead a PLC, “it pushed me out of my comfort zone,” and the experience made him a better teacher. As for winning teachers over, “it’s hard to not like a principal who leads by example and who is willing to move heaven and earth to see that the right work gets done.”

What a strong school culture looks like

Stuart has worked in “dozens of school cultures” as a classroom teacher and professional development facilitator. The richest, he said, “tend to be those with principals who have a passionate belief in the excellence of their teachers, who aren’t afraid to speak the truth when they see bad teacher practice, and who lead authentically (meaning they admit mistakes and show shortcomings).”

This interview was first published in the “Down the Hall” column of Scholastic District Administration.

Common Core standards today: what changed after 2014 and what still holds

When this interview was published, the Common Core standards were at the height of their political fight. They are a set of grade-by-grade goals in English language arts and mathematics, and the full documents are still published by the initiative at corestandards.org. Readers who search “what is common core” today usually want three answers: whether the standards are still in use, whether they worked, and what that means for a school that has to explain its standards to teachers and families. Each answer is less tidy than the arguments of 2014 suggested.

Is Common Core still used?

More than 40 states and the District of Columbia adopted the standards during the Obama years, when states could meet a federal “college and career-ready standards” requirement through Race to the Top grants or No Child Left Behind waivers. In a 2020 fact check, Education Week’s Evie Blad reported that many states still teach under the standards, and that some states which dropped them adopted revised standards that are largely comparable. The same article notes that the Every Student Succeeds Act bars federal officials from tying the adoption of any set of standards to money or flexibility, so the choice now rests entirely with each state.

Some states have made a clean break. Florida’s State Board of Education adopted the B.E.S.T. standards (Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking) in February 2020, with new English standards starting in kindergarten through grade 2 in 2021-22 and the new standards in place for all grades in both subjects in 2022-23. South Dakota is a more recent case. In May 2026 its Board of Education Standards approved new math standards to move away from the Common Core math standards the state first put in place in 2010, with adoption planned for July 2027. The decision was contested: the president of the South Dakota Council of Teachers of Mathematics called the process flawed, while the state’s education secretary defended it as public and thorough. No single, current national count separates states that kept the standards, renamed them, revised them or replaced them, so a leader who wants to know where a state stands should read that state’s own standards documents rather than rely on a label.

What the research found

The evidence on results is modest and disputed. A 2019 study by Mengli Song and colleagues at the American Institutes for Research, released through the federally funded research center C-SAIL, compared states by how much the switch changed their prior standards. Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum reported that states that changed most did not outpace other states on national NAEP tests, and that by 2017 the standards appeared linked to modest declines in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. The study had not been peer reviewed, it compared two groups of states that both adopted the standards, and its authors acknowledged substantial uncertainty. Morgan Polikoff, who co-directs the center, called the question “more or less impossible to answer.”

Writing in Education Next in 2020, the researcher Tom Loveless argued that the Common Core did not accomplish what its supporters intended, noting that the C-SAIL estimates ran from about 1.5 to 4 NAEP scale points below zero. Loveless went further and suggested that content standards in general have little bearing on how much students learn. The same forum carried replies from Polikoff, titled “Common Standards Aren’t Enough,” and from Michael Petrilli, titled “Stay the Course on National Standards.” Taken together, the research does not support the strongest claims made on either side in 2014: the standards did not transform achievement, and there is no clear evidence that they caused large harm.

What Stuart’s advice means for leaders now

If standards on their own move achievement only a little, then much depends on how schools use them, which is the work Stuart describes above. Stuart’s starting point is to agree on what the school is trying to produce and only then to appraise the standards against that aim. That approach works whether a state still uses the Common Core, has renamed it, or has replaced it as Florida did and South Dakota plans to. It also matches Stuart’s warning against reacting to every policy change with more test preparation. Leaders working on standards this year can take several practical steps from the interview:

• Write the school’s aim for a graduate in a single sentence, as Stuart asks of workshop participants, and share it before any standards training begins.
• Read the state’s current standards document side by side with that aim, and note where they line up and where they differ.
• When a state announces new standards, use the gap before adoption (in South Dakota’s case, more than a year) to plan teacher learning and new materials rather than waiting for the first test results.
• Explain changes to families in terms of what students will learn, not what the standards are called, since the name is often the least informative part.
• Give teacher leaders, such as the PLC role Stuart describes, a real part in that work.

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