School & District Management

Support for Common Core Continues to Decline, Poll Says

By Liana Loewus — August 23, 2016 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

The percentage of the general public who say they support the Common Core State Standards dropped from 49 to 42 percent over the last year, according to a poll released today by Education Next, a K-12 policy journal.

Just three years ago, 65 percent of people said they supported the common standards.

However, the poll, which is in its 10th year of publication, also shows that some of the lack of support may be a branding problem: When asked whether they support “standards for reading and math that are the same across the states” and used for accountability—a question in which the words common core don’t appear—public support shot up to 55 percent.

While that characterization reflected the initial promise of the common core, it may not be completely fair at this point. As my colleague Andrew Ujifusa pointed out on the Politics K-12 blog, so many states have “fiddled with, altered, or replaced at least portions of the common core recently, whether the standards are truly the same across state lines might be increasingly up for debate.”

In several cases, though, states have renamed the standards without changing much within the content—likely in part an attempt to combat negative perceptions associated with the branding.

EdNext surveyed about 4,200 people in May and June this year. Within the sample, there were 1,571 parents with school-age children in the home and 609 teachers. (Other than those oversamples, the group was nationally representative.)

Among teachers, support for the common core was at 41 percent. That’s up just slightly from a year ago, when it was at 40 percent. When the words common core aren’t mentioned, 46 percent of teachers say they support standards that are the same across the states—down 2 percent from 2015.

Looking just at parents, support for the common-core standards is waning, the poll shows. Forty-two percent of parents support them, down from 47 percent last year.

Interestingly, the reverse is true when parents were asked about the standards without the common-core branding. Fifty-seven percent of parents said they support such standards—up from just half of parents in 2015.

For comprehensive coverage of the survey, head to the Politics K-12 blog.

Related Tags:

A version of this news article first appeared in the Curriculum Matters blog.