Dive Brief:

• President-elect Donald Trump derided the Common Core State Standards throughout his campaign, and one of his only comments about education on his election website was about the need to eliminate the standards.
• NPR reports creating education standards has always been up to the states, but some say the Obama administration’s Race to the Top funding competition coerced states into adopting them and that a Trump administration could similarly coerce states into abandoning them.
• The Every Student Succeeds Act did make it harder for presidents to influence standards in that way, but anti-Common Core Republicans at the state level may take Trump’s election as a cue to renew the fight against the standards in their states.

Dive Insight:

Much of the fury over the Common Core State Standards was about implementation rather than the content of the standards themselves. Sure, there were those who lamented the end of cursive or struggled to accept new strategies for teaching math, but the greatest opposition came years after the standards were actually adopted by states, when they started to test students based on them. High-stakes testing, much more than any content decisions, doomed the standards’ popular support.

Most states have backed off of tying teacher evaluations to student performance on these standardized tests, which takes off some of the pressure, and others have gone back to other national tests like the ACT to fulfill high school testing requirements instead of Common Core-aligned PARCC or Smarter Balanced exams. Still, some states might replace the Common Core, emboldened by the new president’s hatred for them. But if we look to other states that have done the same thing, we know the replacement standards are remarkably similar.