Does the Common Core prepare marginalized students for college?

A new paper sheds light on how the educational initiative has affected urban high school students.

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The Common Core State Standards were developed with a lofty goal: “to ensure that all students have the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life upon graduation from high school, regardless of where they live.” For students who live in urban areas, however, the effect of the Common Core has proved uneven, with students at some schools reporting a welcome push from their teachers to develop college-ready skills, and students at others registering no change in instruction at all.

That is one finding of a new paper published in Urban Education, which studied 54 college-bound seniors from nine inner-city high schools. Pullias research assistant Suneal Kolluri, who authored the study,  found that schools varied widely in their implementation of Common Core standards — which led to a wide variety of student perceptions of these standards.

“While at many schools, there appears to have been a clear push towards instruction that encourages critical thinking, the fidelity with which the pedagogies have been implemented varies substantially,” Kolluri explained. “At some schools, however, no instructional changes appear to have been made, and numerous students reported never having heard of the Common Core.”

Kolluri focused his research on students from underresourced high schools that serve primarily low-income students from historically marginalized groups. Students from two of the schools enthusiastically reported “a shift to teaching practices intended to develop higher-order thinking,” but students from five others did not. In fact, 39 percent of the students Kolluri interviewed noticed no changes in the curriculum at all.

Kolluri also discovered that the curriculum in all the schools tended to have “a narrow instructional focus on canonical texts and European-centric perspectives” — despite the fact that most of the students are Latinx, and many texts by Latinx authors are recommended by the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

“Certainly, space exists within the standards to develop culturally relevant pedagogies that have been shown to benefit students from marginalized backgrounds,” Kolluri said. “However, my article questions the extent to which teachers are taking advantage of these opportunities within the curricular flexibility they are afforded.”

This study is part of Kolluri’s ongoing research on college readiness for marginalized youth.

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Kolluri, S. (2018). Student perspectives on the common core: The challenge of college readiness at urban high schools. Urban Education, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085918772630