Evidence Use in the Common Core State Standards Initiative

• In Event: Diverse Perspectives on Understanding the Policy Uses of Education Research

Abstract

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative is an unprecedented effort to establish K-12 mathematics and English language arts standards that are common across multiple states. Framed as a strategy for enhancing global competitiveness by raising the achievement of U.S. students and ensuring more equal learning opportunities regardless of a student's place of residence, the CCSS moved from an idea advanced by a few policy entrepreneurs to adopted policy in 46 states within a span of less than five years. From the beginning, CCSS proponents asserted that the standards were intended to be "research and evidence-based."

This presentation is drawn from a study examining the evidence used in the CCSS initiative. The project's goal is to gain a better understanding of how evidence is utilized in developing and promoting policy ideas, and the role that policy entrepreneurs play in interpreting, framing, and applying research and other evidence in policy venues. Its guiding hypotheses are drawn from the research literature on policy stability and change. The types of data include: content analysis of several hundred reports, press releases, on-line presentations, and other artifacts that CCSS participants and their critics have produced; elite interviews with approximately 90 national CCSS leaders, representatives of organizations supporting them, officials in four states, members of the CCSS working groups and validation committee, researchers, and groups expressing concerns about the CCSS; and participant summaries of weekly conference calls among groups advancing the CCSS.

These data will be analyzed over the next year using case comparisons across institutional actors and policymaking venues, process tracing over phases of the policy process, and social network analysis. Preliminary analyses suggest several tentative findings. First, in areas where research evidence is limited or inconsistent, policy proponents and critics alike meld research with other types of evidence such as personal experience and assessments of past policies to create a complex form of professional judgment. Second, foundations and other funders can serve as central nodes on extensive networks of researchers, policy entrepreneurs, and national and grassroots advocacy organizations. Third, in the case of the CCSS, one function of research-based evidence is as a political strategy to deflect the reemergence of past ideological conflicts over curricular values.

The scholarly significance of the study is threefold: 1) linking a theoretically grounded examination of knowledge use to the broader research literature on policy ideas and the strategic behavior of policy entrepreneurs and their targets; 2) measuring evidence use with multiple methods that allow validation of user self-reports; and 3) specifying how research and other types of evidence change over the course of the policy process from problem definition and advocacy of solutions to implementation.

Authors

• Lorraine M. McDonnell, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Stephen Weatherford, University of California - Santa Barbara