States with standards that are closest to the Common Core State Standards in mathematics tend to do better, according to a new paper based on national test data from 2009.
William H. Schmidt, an education professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing, and his Michigan State colleague Richard Houang, developed a statistical measure of “congruence” among standards, which they used to compare states’ math standards as well as those from the highest-achieving countries taking part in TIMSS, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. To facilitate the international comparison, the researchers used what is called the “A+ profile,” a composite of the standards of those countries, which include Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Singapore, among others.
The report finds a high degree of consistency in math topic coverage between the A+ standards and the common core, which, it says, suggests the common standards are “rigorous” and “internationally competitive.”
The analysis also shows that the more closely aligned a state’s standards were to the common core, the higher its students scored on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
