Many are concerned about the large decline in K-12 student achievement since 2019. And rightly so, given what it signals about student learning and later life outcomes. Less noted is the pre-pandemic sustained decline in student achievement growth that followed 30 years of increases. We examine the nature of achievement decline as measured by…

A continuing priority in education has focused on preparing students for postacademic success. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards Initiative prompted educational leaders to focus on preparing students to be "college and career ready." Definitions, perceptions, and efforts to improve college and career readiness vary widely.…

State assessment leaders are concerned about the challenges with receiving full approval from the U.S. Department of Education (USED) when using the ACT or the SAT as their assessment of high school achievement. USED has asked states opting to use the ACT or the SAT as the achievement indicator under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to…

Textbooks are a widely used educational intervention that can affect student achievement, and the marginal cost of choosing a more effective textbook is typically small. However, we know little about how textbooks get from the publisher to the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways mathematics textbook adoption practices…

Guidelines for teaching California's students have changed dramatically in recent years, as state leaders have adopted new academic standards, curriculum frameworks, and instructional materials lists in an attempt to better prepare students for college and career. However, adopting high-quality standards and curriculum materials does not guarantee…

Every year millions of Americans gain valuable college credit-worthy learning through workplace training, the military, apprenticeships, & professional certifications. Nearly all of this learning goes unrecognized by colleges & universities. Without a consistent way to recognize, reward, and transfer this learning, many people are left…

The balanced development of cognitive and noncognitive skills is crucial not only for well-rounded child development in schools but also for career and life success. Unlike academic learning standards, however, there are rarely comparable "socioemotional learning" (SEL) standards. Under the pressure of high-stakes testing policies…

Textbooks are a widely used educational intervention that can affect student achievement, and the marginal cost of choosing a more effective textbook is typically small. However, we know little about how textbooks get from the publisher to the classroom. We use a lens of institutional theory and interviews with district leaders in a stratified…

California's education policy agenda, in particular the near-simultaneous implementation of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), has created challenges and opportunities for the state. Coming on the heels of the Great Recession of 2008, these enormous shifts--the demands for substantially new teaching…

This analysis of college- and career-ready standards implementation is grounded in the policy attributes framework, which states that the more specific, consistent, authoritative, powerful, and stable a policy is, the better implementation will be (Porter, 1994). "Specificity" refers to how extensive, detailed, or prescriptive a policy…

Is the Common Core really "dead"? Though no longer called the Common Core in our three study states, the "new" college-and-career readiness standards still guide much of education policy in Texas, Ohio, and Kentucky. In our new feature article in "Educational Researcher," lead author Dr. Laura Desimone, along with…

The PPIC Statewide Survey delivers nonpartisan, objective, advocacy-free information on the perceptions, opinions, and public policy preferences of California residents. PPIC invites input, comments, and suggestions from policy and public opinion experts and from its own advisory committee, but survey methods, questions, and content are determined…

This article reports on why states are quitting the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). The two consortia sought to develop state-of-the-art assessments that focused on problem solving and the application of knowledge, and that moved away from former tests'…

Prior studies portray support for the Common Core in California (Finkelstein et al. 2018; Jochim and Lavery 2015) as well as support for other significant reforms, like the change in California's school finance system (Koppich and Humphrey 2018). Along with enthusiasm for California's policy changes over the past decade have come calls to…

The Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL) examines how college- and career-readiness (CCR) standards are implemented, whether they improve student learning, and what instructional tools measure and support their implementation. Established in July 2015 and funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S.…