Predictors of States’ Adoption of Common Core State Standards: Federal Incentivization, National Interaction, and Prior Policy Adoption, by Mark LaVenia

Charges of federal overreach have plagued the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) since the Obama administration’s decision to tie adoption of common K-12 standards to the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative (e.g., McCluskey 2010; Whitehurst 2010). In the words of Pennsylvania State Representative Glenn Thompson, this decision has transferred the Standards “from a voluntary, State-based initiative to a set of Federal academic standards with corresponding Federal tests” (U.S. House of Representatives 2009, 4). Further, the quick succession of state adoptions that occurred leading up to the August 2010 RTTT deadline gave the appearance that states were merely adopting the Standards in effort to be competitive for RTTT funds. Compounding this issue, is the assertion that the widespread budgetary shortfalls experienced by U.S. states rendered them particularly vulnerable to the sway of federal inducements such as those embedded in the RTTT program. As stated by New York State Senator Stephen Saland, “It’s a little bit like holding out a steak for someone who is standing in a soup line. And in devastatingly difficult times, the lure of money coming from the feds can be very intoxicating” (Boulard 2010, 13). We look at these issues in our recent study published in the American Journal of Education.

Conversely, proponents of the Standards argue that the momentum behind the CCSS coincided with a years-long struggle to increase the rigor of state standards. Rather than seeing state adoption of the Standards as a routine response to a financial inducement, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (2010) credited RTTT with having “unleashed an avalanche of pent-up education reform activity at the state and local level” (para. 15). Moreover, assertions of federal coercion are countered by arguments that state adoption of the CCSS reflects the actions of states serving their self-determined interests. From this perspective, RTTT funds are viewed as support provided to states to help them undertake reforms they wanted anyway. Or, at a minimum, states’ decisions to adopt the CCSS were motivated by the competitive desire of states to ensure that their standards were as good as any in the U.S. (Kober and Rentner 2011).

Despite these perceptions, little is known about states’ adoption and the degree to which federal incentivization conditioned their decisions. Using an innovation diffusion conceptual lens and event history analysis, we tested the influence of states’ aspiration for RTTT funds, controlling for a set of other predictors typically correlated with state’s decisions to undertake policy adoption (LaVenia, Cohen-Vogel, and Lang 2015). Three findings emerged from our analyses. First, RTTT fund aspiration was a clear determinant of whether and when states adopted the CCSS. However, in addition, evidence was also found for the influence of membership in national policy networks and prior adoption of standards-based reform. The independent effects for policy network membership and states’ previous standards-based reform activity suggest that, irrespective of the vertical influence of the federal government, states’ memberships in policy networks and their predisposition for standards-based reform were also determinants of whether and when states adopted the CCSS.

Confirming the influence of the federal program on states’ adoption behavior does not necessarily support the claims of federal coercion, however. States under financial duress, critics argue, adopted standards they otherwise would not have adopted, absent the financial inducement to do so. Although our findings cannot tell us whether states that adopted the CCSS would have done so during periods of relative economic strength or in the absence of the federal RTTT program, we were able to partially investigate the claim by examining the interaction of RTTT aspiration and state fiscal health. Thus, we were able to compare the influence of RTTT in states with more and less healthy economies. When we did, we found no evidence that RTTT aspirants were any more likely to adopt the CCSS when their states were relatively worse off financially.

While our findings demonstrate the vertical influence federal incentivization can have on state adoption activity, our findings also support earlier work in education (e.g., Cohen-Vogel, Ingle, Albee, and Spence 2008; Mintrom and Vergari 1998) showing that the likelihood of state adoption may be enhanced through participation in national policy consortia. Just why this is so remains unanswered. Perhaps the policy learning that occurs through the work of policy consortia and networks leads participants to value cross-state alignment or to fear being left behind. Another possible explanation for the extent to which network membership conditions state adoption may be the realization among participants that the coordination of effort and pooling of resources may potentially result in improved and less expensive content standards and assessment systems.

Our findings also indicate that states were more likely to adopt the CCSS and to do so earlier when they had previously enacted standards-based reform policies, suggesting, as did Mokher and McLendon (2009), that “some states seem to have a preternatural propensity toward innovating in certain policy areas” (255). Others before us have documented a propensity by some states for standards-based reform. Massell’s (2008) analysis of education policy activity in the early 1990s, for example, suggested that, for many states, K–12 education standards represented “a central framework guiding state education policy and practice” (2), as compared to other states where policy initiatives did not stem from any significant internal standards-based reform impetus.

Our study is unique in terms of the time interval under investigation and in its application to state board and chief decisions. Unlike the focus on year-to-year policy adoption by state legislatures employed in the vast majority of event history analyses, our study looked at adoption events on a monthly basis made possible by the quick and sweeping nature of CCSS activity. Event history analysis applied in this way is particularly useful for understanding state policymaking around curriculum and assessment—areas that are likely to be missed by studies of legislative activity alone. With the development of the Next Generation Science Standards and the roll out of the two consortia’s CCSS assessments, coming reforms in education will again highlight the role of non-legislative state actors and the need to apply methods like ours for understanding states’ efforts towards school improvement.

Mark LaVenia is an Assistant in Research at the Learning Systems Institute and a doctoral candidate in educational leadership and policy studies at Florida State University. His research interests include school reform, professional development, and quantitative data modeling.

References

Boulard, Garry. 2010. “The Common Good? The Debate over Common Core Standards for K–12 Education is Heating Up.” State Legislatures (September).

Cohen-Vogel, Lora, Kyle Ingle, Amy Albee, and Matthew Spence. 2008. “The ‘Spread’ of Merit-Based College Aid: Politics, Policy Consortia and Interstate Competition.” Educational Policy 22 (3): 339–62.

Duncan, Arne. 2010. “The Quiet Revolution: Secretary Arne Duncan’s Remarks at the National Press Club.” U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C., July 27.

Kober, Nancy, and Diane Stark Rentner. 2011. “States’ Progress and Challenges in Implementing Common Core State Standards.” Center on Education Policy, Washington, D.C. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service no. ED 514598).

LaVenia, Mark, Lora Cohen-Vogel, and Laura B. Lang. 2015. “The Common Core State Standards Initiative: An Event History Analysis of State Adoption.” American Journal of Education 121 (2): 145–82.

Massell, Diane. 2008. “The Current Status and Role of Standards-Based Reform in the United States.” Paper prepared for the National Research Council Workshop on Assessing the Role of K–12 Academic Standards in States, January, Washington, D.C.

McCluskey, Neal. 2010. “Run Away from ‘Common’ Education Standards.” CATO Institute: Commentary, March 18, http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/run-away-common-education-standards.

Mintrom, Michael, and Sandra Vergari. 1998. “Policy Networks and Innovation Diffusion: The Case of State Education Reforms.” The Journal of Politics 60 (1): 126–48.

Mokher, Christine, and Michael McLendon. 2009. “Uniting Secondary and Postsecondary Education: An Event History Analysis of State Adoption of Dual Enrollment Policies.” American Journal of Education 115 (2): 249–77.

U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Education and Labor. 2009. Improving Our Competitiveness: Common Core Education Standards. 111th Cong. 1, December 8.

Whitehurst, Grover J. “Russ”. 2010. “Did Congress Authorize Race to the Top?” Education Week, April 27, http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/04/28/30whitehurst_ep.h29.html.