Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction and Learning (C-SAIL)

Study 1: College- and Career-Ready Standards Implementation 

The implementation study sought to understand state, district, and school efforts to implement CCR standards since the publication of the Common Core State Standards and other CCR standards. The Implementation study provided a detailed picture of how states and districts are supporting implementation of the standards, how educators are interpreting the standards and changing their practice in response to them, and how these changes are related to measures of student learning. 

Design: The researchers collected data from 70 districts across 5 states: California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Texas. Within each district, they selected two elementary and two high schools, and within each school, two math and two ELA teachers, as well as a teacher of English learning students and a teacher of students with disabilities in the high schools. C-SAIL conducted interviews with state and district administrators, reviewed state and district implementation documents, and surveyed district officers, principals, and teachers. Using these qualitative and quantitative data along with annual student assessment data, the researchers determined whether differences in states’ policy systems are related to trends in implementation and student achievement and whether some standards are easier to implement effectively than others. 

C-SAIL used supplemental funding from IES to conduct one “deep dive” case study in each of our four partner states, plus the School District of Philadelphia (SDP). The goal of the deep dives was to better understand how standards were being implemented, mediating and moderating influences, and interactions among different respondents, policies, and other key features of the policy system. Specifically, this ‘deep dive’ allowed the Center to learn about standards interpretations, the features and quality of supports and guidance for implementing standards, and schools’ and teachers’ changing practices in response to the standards. This qualitative inquiry also allowed researchers to investigate innovative approaches to standards implementation. 

Key Outcomes: 

• More local control of standards implementation was a challenge for some districts, while others achieved what the grantee termed “flexible specificity” by creating instructional strategies that successfully balanced flexibility (local and classroom control) with guidance (clear instructions about what and how to teach) (Stornaiuolo, Polikoff & Desimone, 2023). 
• Teachers and administrators were generally supportive of the standards and thought they were appropriate for their students; a notable exception were special education teachers, who were more likely to see the content standards as inappropriate for the students they served, reflecting a persistent tension between standardization and individualization (Edgerton & Desimone, 2019; Edgerton, Fuchs & Fuchs, 2020).
• The relationship between teachers’ perceptions of the standards and standards-aligned instruction shifted over time—in 2016, teachers’ buy-in was associated with more standards-aligned instruction; in 2019, teachers’ perceptions of specificity of policy documents and guidance was associated with more standards-aligned instruction (Comstock, Edgerton, & Desimone, 2022). 
• State guidance on standards implementation varied. Texas had a robust state-level infrastructure for guidance and support in Texas, while Ohio had fewer state-developed resources in Ohio in favor of local control. Still, even with state infrastructure in Texas, aspects of teachers’ local context—in particular, lack of infrastructure for ongoing, embedded professional learning—limited teachers’ ability to engage in state-developed guidance (Comstock, Edgerton, & Desimone, 2022). 
• Standards implementation efforts for ELs have become more centralized, with states and national consortia taking on more active roles in developing identification and reclassification guidelines and procedures local districts are expected to adhere to. The states, in partnership with these national organizations, seem to be providing much more specificity and consistency (aligning supportive materials and PD with standards and assessments) in implementation of standards for ELs. They do this through authority mechanisms that give the standards legitimacy and generate buy-in (e.g., rules, historical practice), an approach we label “authoritative specificity” (Flores, Saldívar Garcia, & Edgerton, 2023).

Study 2: Longitudinal Outcomes 

The longitudinal outcomes study leveraged the natural variation in the rigor of states’ standards prior to the introduction of CCR standards to assess the effects of states’ adoption of more rigorous standards on student outcomes. This study aimed to determine whether states’ adoption of more rigorous standards as part of the latest wave of standards-based reform led to increases in the achievement test scores and high school graduation rate for the overall student population and for student subgroups including students with disabilities and English Learners. The research team also explored whether the effects of states’ adoption of more rigorous standards was moderated by the specificity, consistency, authority, power, and stability of states’ implementation of CCR standards. 

Design: The researchers used a comparative interrupted time series (CITS) design to explore the impact of more rigorous standards on key student outcomes, using the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores in grades 4 and 8 and high school graduation rates compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The team measured policy attributes by constructing a 50-state database that describes each state's policies along each of the five policy dimensions. 

Key Outcomes: 

• States’ adoption of more rigorous standards that was at the center of the latest wave of standards-based reform did not lead to improved student achievement during the first 7 years after the adoption of the standards (Song et al., 2022). 
• The effects of states’ adoption of more rigorous standards varied across NAEP subscales and student subgroups, with most of the effects in the negative direction and non-significant. The negative effects on reading subscales for Grade 4, however, did reach statistical significance (Song et al., 2022). 

Study 3: Measurement 

The measurement study generated a set of instruments that the project team used to analyze the academic content and cognitive demand of teachers' instruction and their classroom assessments (i.e., quizzes or exams), as well as curriculum materials. The primary objective of the measurement instruments was to assess alignment of instruction and materials to college- and career-ready standards. The work resulted in revisions to the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) framework and generated: (1) a revised SEC rubric for rating standards, assessments, and curriculum materials; (2) revised weekly and semester-long teacher surveys; and (3) a new observation instrument to measure the quality of teachers' instruction in terms of its alignment with college- and career-ready standards. The Center used these products in its implementation and intervention studies and has made these instruments available to other researchers seeking to assess alignment of instruction and curriculum materials (Polikoff et al., 2020).

Key Outcomes: 

• Created a revised Surveys of Enacted Curriculum in mathematics and ELA to measure teachers’ coverage of CCR standards (Polikoff et al., 2020).
• Developed a general process for researchers to use to revise or update the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum as needed for individual studies (Polikoff et al., 2020).
• Provided validity evidence for the revised Surveys of Enacted Curriculum; demonstrated areas of relative strength and weakness in terms of the validity of teacher self-reports of content coverage (Polikoff et al., 2020).

Study 4: The FAST Intervention Evaluation 

This study evaluated the impact of the Feedback on Alignment and Support for Teachers (FAST) program, which provided instructional guidance to teachers. FAST used instructional coaches to help teachers address both the topic and cognitive demand requirements within college- and career-ready standards for math or ELA. The FAST program included four key components: (1) grade-level teacher team meetings to discuss aligning instruction to the standards; (2) one-on-one coaching sessions between trained coaches and teachers; (3) tracking of instructional practices through teachers’ self-reported logs and self-selected videotapes of classroom instruction; and (4) a resource base with videos and model lesson plans to support standards-aligned instruction. 

Design: To test the FAST program, the researchers conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 56 elementary schools located in 5 districts across 3 states. They chose the school as the unit of assignment because the FAST program encourages collaboration among teachers, and they randomly assigned schools separately within each district and in blocks within the three larger districts. The main outcomes were a measure of the alignment of teachers’ instruction to state standards and students' scores on states' end-of-year state assessments (in math and ELA). Researchers employed multi-level models consistent with the sampling strategy to estimate the impact of the FAST program on teacher and student outcomes. 

Key Outcomes: 

• Over the course of the two-year FAST program, teachers participated in roughly half of the intended FAST activities (Smith, et al., 2023).
• The program had a positive impact on the alignment of teachers’ instruction with standards for both math and ELA teachers (effect sizes = 0.70 and 0.40, respectively), although the impact was statistically significant only for math teachers (Smith, et al., 2023).
• The program’s impact on student achievement, however, was in the negative direction for both fourth-grade mathematics and fifth-grade ELA (effect sizes = -0.07 and -0.10, respectively), although the impact on achievement was statistically significant only for ELA (Smith, et al., 2023).