Common Core State Standards

Development of the CCSS

The CCSS, developed with leadership from the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association, were promoted as being (a) research and evidence based, (b) aligned with college and work expectations, (c) rigorous in content and application of knowledge through higher order thinking skills, and (d) internationally benchmarked. They were also described as “fewer, clearer, higher” standards that were built on the strengths and lessons of existing state standards and that could provide a roadmap for K–12 curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

Standards-based education reform began in the early 1990s, spurred by models of reform that rested on a clear designation of what students needed to know and be able to do. Driven by a quest for an education system that promoted both equity and excellence, the assumption was that all students should be taught the same content and be held to the same performance standards. States were to define the content and performance standards and then develop assessments to evaluate how students were doing in relation to the standards.

The need for something other than content standards of ELA and math defined by individual states grew out of numerous discussions among states and national organizations. The reasons behind the push for new standards were numerous. A primary concern was that the United States was falling behind other countries in terms of the knowledge and skills demonstrated by students on international assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. On the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, 15-year-olds in more than 30 countries outperformed 15-year-olds in the United States. Beyond that was the finding that many students entering postsecondary institutions had to take remedial classes because they had not obtained the skills that they needed, even though they had earned a high school diploma. Supporters of the need for new standards cited the finding that 20% of students entering 4-year colleges and 40% of students entering 2-year community colleges had to take remedial courses.

Another reason frequently cited was that each state had set different criteria for what students needed to know and be able to do, and when students moved from one state to another, they were suddenly either way behind or way ahead of where they needed to be. Evidence of the differences across states was the performance of students in Grades 4 and 8 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the one measure used across all of the states. Further, states’ content standards were often deemed to represent minimal skills inconsistent with the skills that would be needed in jobs of the future, where individuals would need more than basic math and ELA skills, such as communication, technical reading and writing, literacy across disciplines, and more complex mathematics.

...