More on Public Opinion and Standardization

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Kid: The Sequel remains challenging. A friend of mine remarked that Original Kid was probably just as hard but that our brains are partly designed and partly induced by circumstances to make us forget much of these early months. And, you know, that makes sense to me. The fatigue and loopiness from a lack of sleep probably does inhibit forming memories. I think that’s a good thing! If people remembered every struggle and every sleepless night, they’d have fewer kids. It’s an evolutionary advantage to mostly remember your prior kids’ newborn phase as a positive thing! Needless to say, I apologize for not posting last week. The combination of a (now) three-year-old and a one-month-old and the in-laws visiting, and a birthday party (plus the requisite panic deep-clean of the home) proved to be too much for me to spend time reading and writing. Today’s post was supposed to be last Wednesday, but I never finished it. With the older kiddo starting 3K, I should once again have much more time in the mornings to put together posts. Whether the quality improves is a whole other thing.

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3

My last post argues that the public hates standardization.

The People Hate Standardization

James

·

Aug 27

Continuing with my intention to rant about things while I’m sleepless and scattered, I thought I would connect some dots that, to me, seem very obvious but that somehow many people don’t seem to notice. I want to make the case that increasing standardization of schooling, via the standards, their effects on curriculum, and through testing, has alienated a large number of parents. The result of this alienation is 1) the perception that even good public schools are bad and 2) an openness to alternative school choice structures, primarily vouchers.

Read full story

Today I’d like to try and grapple with that concept a bit more and answer a few questions I have about the public’s view of schools, standardization, parental control of education, and teasing out some understanding of standardized tests and assessment. I think I’m pretty much correct at the headline level but saying that parents or the public don’t like standardization or standardized tests doesn’t help us come to any actionable insights. Well, nothing actionable besides giving in to anti-public school vouchers and 100% choice systems.

Standardization and Conservative Opposition

In the US the main thrust of standardization of schools came from the Common Core. While many states developed standards in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Common Core was really the first time a national set of standards came into existence. Because the federal government can’t set curriculum, these standards were not a federal initiative, although sometimes you heard people complain about it as such. Instead, the Common Core was developed and piloted by the National Governors Association (NGA), a political body comprised of the governors of each state. My governor at the time, Sonny Purdue, was chair of the NGA and Georgia piloted draft versions of the Common Core Standards. The led to the amazing experience as a student teacher of writing lesson plans that had to adhere to three separate sets of standards: Draft Common Core, Georgia Performance Standards, and Gwinnett County’s standards the Gwinnett County Performance Standards for Academic Knowledge and Skills (GCPS-AKS).

Anyway. Common Core quickly became a lightning rod for some conservatives because they became associated with the Obama Administration’s signature education achievement, Race to the Top. You had guys like Marco Rubio breaking ranks with Republican Governors to argue that Common Core “is increasingly being used by the Obama Administration to turn the Department of Education into what is effectively a national school board. This effort to coerce states into adhering to national curriculum standards is not the best way to help our children attain the best education. Empowering parents, local communities and the individual states is the best approach.” Look at Rubio showing off his populist streak back in 2014! I think this is also a great example of something I wrote about back in January, that the political “treaty” that limited the kinds of school reform considered possible by the left and the right, was being torn up in the waning Obama years. Glenn Beck devoted whole episodes to attacking Common Core. Beck wrote a book advocating against it. Dark-Pool funded websites launched to organize and collect conservative anti-Common Core leaders and call for so-called “Higher Core Standards” created by states as an alternative. Michelle Malkin (remember her) argued that the standards were secretly federal and were aimed at inculcating moral relativism and promoting leftist ideology.

Around 2013-14 when all this was going on, public opinion toward Common Core was mildly positive but about a third of parents surveyed by Gallup/PDK said they’d never heard of Common Core. Even in states that had already implemented Common Core, parents were barely more likely to have heard of the standards.

What I also find interesting is that among parents who said they were familiar with Common Core we see a significant minority, 42%, who were either somewhat or very negative. Gallup also looked at the political affiliation of those who had unfavorable views of Common Core and, unsurprisingly, it was Republicans.

Interestingly, that same poll found that parents were largely supportive of “standardized computer-based testing to measure all students’ performance and progress” at 65% overall positive. Even Republicans somewhat liked “standardized computer-based testing” with a 58/41 positive negative split. Other more partisan surveys at the same time found similar attitudes but I do want to highlight one dissenting report.

By the 2014-2015 school year, states were repealing Common Core or overturning the standards in favor of writing their own. As you might imagine, this was largely centered on conservative states like Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee. There was one “blue state” to repeal Common Core and that was New Jersey, though they more or less took the Common Core and renamed it. Minnestoa only implemented the ELA standards.

Another interesting thing about that adoption and implementation chart are the dates in the notes column. Even though 41 states adopted Common Core in 2010, actual implementation dates are all over the place. Some states didn’t implement the standards until as late as 2016-2017. Hell, in 2014 New York delayed implementation of Common Core’s assessment requirements until 2022. By the time the COVID Pandemic rolled around in 2020, a small number of states had only two or three years of experience with teaching and learning under the actual standards. I wonder how many students and parents even fully experienced schools under the common core standards? I wonder if there wasn’t some conflation of those standards with the testing regime that began under No Child Left Behind and rolled out starting in 2005? I haven’t been able to find a ton of good data that sorts out parents’ understanding of which policies were in effect, when, and how they impacted what their kids experienced in school.

What I think we can confidently say is that there’s been a decade of conservative activism against standardization and in favor of more local control and more parental control. Those activist stances may have seemed small or fringe back in 2015 but they were speaking to a larger normie and center-right dislike of standardization. I am not surprised, for example, that surveys done by an institute to expand school choice would find ways to tell the public that parent’s hated Common Core. Their message has to rely on public schools being bad in some way. I think they successfully sold the perception that DC had taken control of schools via the Common Core Standards even though that was far from the case.

Speaking of Testing

Attitudes toward standardized testing are a bit harder to break down but they’re more positive than I might have assumed. I’ve written before that the opt-out movement was centered in places that leaned conservative in general elections. While many teachers unions and anti-reform leftists were opposed to standardized testing, they also understood that funding, schools staying open, and students’ future economic success were tied to performing well on the tests, so they mostly did not opt their kids out. Wealthy suburban districts mostly did not face school closure threats and were well funded. They could also more safely opt their kids out of state exams and assume they’d be successful in life.

What we saw in the 2014 Gallup/PDK polling was a decent level of support for standardized tests, or at least what they phrased as “standardized computer-based testing” in that survey. The 2025 Gallup/PDK survey data was released last month and they did not ask about standardized testing directly, only about whether parents would want AI to help their kids prepare for standardized tests. The last time they asked directly about standardized testing and achievement testing was 2020. For obvious reasons, parents’ answers may have been a little off that year.

At that point in time, adults felt there was too much emphasis on achievement testing by a roughly 2 to 1 margin, 41% to 21%. Among parents of K-12 students, 38% said there was too much emphasis on achievement testing while 23% said there was too little. But, this was the pandemic year! One interesting facet of parental support for testing is that after some post-Common Core declines, many parents supported cancelling standardized tests in the pandemic only for support to bounce back post-pandemic. And, even in the 2020 Gallup PDK poll, we get a few extra questions about how testing data should be used.

If I look back another year, to the 2019 Gallup/PDK poll, the only mentions of testing are in relation to teacher strikes. E.g. would parents or the public support teachers striking to gain more control over “standards, testing, and curriculum” but not for higher pay. They would by a larger margin than teachers themselves would vote to strike.

I think what I’m deriving from all this is that parents do see legitimate uses for standardized tests and a slight majority, as noted above, view standardization favorably but what they want is for those tests and those standards to make sense in the local context of their kid’s school. They support teachers in striking to gain more control over standards and tests and curricula because they want the actual humans who know their kids to attenuate some of the inappropriate aspects of standardization.

This also reminds me of a classic study from the ‘90s that looked at parents attitudes toward standardized testing. What they found was that parents generally viewed standardized tests positively but that they did not give preference to test results over other kinds of assessment such as report cards, hearing from a teacher, performance assessments, or seeing examples of student’s work. What parents ultimately wanted was comparative information that helped them to evaluate their child’s progress over the school year and viewed a standardized test as only one component of that information.

It makes sense, then, that parents don’t want a ton of focus on testing but also see many legitimate uses for testing. The more control over testing is held at the local level, the more parents see it as a useful yardstick for understanding their child’s learning and growth. That’s also why they would favor teachers striking to get more control over the standards/testing/curriculum process. It also jives with the idea that parents didn’t want testing during the pandemic but do once the pandemic is done. For the, standardized tests aren’t about measuring policy outcomes or using aggregate data to adjust funding levels. Parents want the tests to tell them something meaningful about their kid and probably felt that all the pandemic era remote schooling and closures would make those results unhelpful.

It’s not the testing, it’s the standardization and loss of local control

Remember, in this year’s Gallup/PDK poll parents say they want a high degree of control over their children’s education. They want to “have a say” and many conservatives and independents are not satisfied with the amount of say that they have. Here are the relevant charts.

Objections to standardization appear to have recent roots in the conservative populist movement. They rightly judged that Americans like local control of schools and would reject anything that seemed like a federal takeover. They found natural allies (or maybe were the same people all along) in school choice advocates who could use every negative headline about the Common Core to press for school vouchers. Parents, though, always saw some legitimate uses for one component of standardization, testing, so long as they felt it had relevance for their child and their school context. When they became concerned that they lacked a say in how their school would use testing and standards, parents began looking for alternatives. Despite all of this, schools are probably less standardized than they were ten years ago at the height of Common Core adoption. NCLB ended with RttT and RttT ended with the first Trump administration. If standards are in place, it’s done at the state level as it has always been. Testing and accountability are now also fully under state discretion. Despite all of that, people seem dissatisfied with the amount of say they have in their local schools, especially among Republicans. It’s hard to know what to make of all that but I want to close with a final top-line finding this year that has also bucked a long-term trend:

Thanks for reading!