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buying. That means they would go without taking advantage of potential savings derived from shifting to online
and open-source materials, among other steps.
If states and districts implemented the common core
by relying on a “balanced approach” to spending, seizing
on some but not all cost-saving options, it would bring the
cost lower, to $5 billion, according to Fordham, a Washington think tank that backs the standards.
Another estimate, published that same year by the Pioneer Institute, a Boston think tank that has been sharply
critical of the common core, put the total costs of implementation at $15.8 billion for one-time and operational
expenses over a seven-year period, which the authors
describe as the typical lifespan of standards before they are
reviewed and revised.
One recent poll sought to drill down on the spending
behavior of districts. Released by MDR, a market-research
company based in Shelton, Conn., the survey found that
68 percent of school systems plan to buy instructional
materials that address the common core, an increase from
62 percent the previous year. The results were based on a
phone survey of district technology and curriculum officials, conducted in April and May of last year.
Flow of Money
Yet determining whether state and district spending
was born directly of the common core, or would have
occurred in the normal course of events, is not easy.
Traditionally, states have updated their standards
and instructional materials aligned to those standards
about every six years, though the cycle can be longer in
some states, said Jay Diskey, the executive director of the
Pre-K-12 Learning Group at the Association of American
Publishers, a Washington-based trade association.
The authors of the Fordham study attempt to isolate
that ongoing, cyclical spending by states and districts from
new, common-core-specific spending. They say that if the
ongoing spending—an estimated $3.9 billion over one
to three years—is taken out, the potential common-core
costs drop significantly, from $12 billion to $8 billion on
the high end, or to as little as $927 million if states and
districts follow a “bare bones” approach to spending.
The author of the Pioneer Institute study, Theodor
Rebarber, agrees that a lot of state and district spending
during the dawn of the common-core era would have
occurred even without the new standards.
Even so, that spending carries tangible financial and
academic costs because it reflects a decision not to devote
money to other strategies in curriculum, testing, and
teacher training that could be more effective, argued Mr.
Rebarber, the CEO of AccountabilityWorks, a Bethesda,
Md.-based nonprofit that helps states and districts with
assessment issues.
“Isn’t that an enormous diversion, an enormous waste
of time for those students who will never get those four
to five years back?” Mr. Rebarber said of the shift to the
common core. “Think about the time spent—for negligible
benefits.”
Other factors cloud attempts to gauge how much states
and districts are spending on the common core. Many
analysts, for instance, note that K-12 spending is also
being triggered by factors such as improving state and
local budget conditions, and schools’ costly and ambitious
commitments to educational technology.
In addition, while the common core has fueled some
types of K-12 purchasing, the flow of money has not been
uniform across the country, observed Scott Marion, the
associate director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a Dover, N.H., organization that works with state and local school systems. The
common core also caused some states and districts to put
buying on hold until they can be sure of what they want,
he noted.
“It’s speeded up the revision cycle, or in some cases,
slowed it down,” he said.
Some of the fast-acting states and districts probably
should have been more discerning buyers, added Mr.
Marion, pointing to criticism that some commercial publishers are simply relabeling old products as common-core
aligned.
Eventually, the common core could help states and districts join together to make purchases of larger volumes of
materials, allowing them to negotiate better contracts and
set higher expectations for companies selling technology
and other K-12 products, said Paul Stembler, the cooperative-development coordinator for the WSCA/NASPO
Cooperative Purchasing Organization. But state and local
officials will probably need a few years to become familiar
enough with the standards to know what to demand of
K-12 companies, said Mr. Stembler, whose organization is
a subsidiary of the National Association of State Procurement Officials, a Lexington, Ky.-based organization.
Right now, the common core is probably “still feeling
fuzzy,” and “the fuzziness fights against a cooperative contract,” Mr. Stembler said.
Meanwhile, providers of potentially low-cost or free
sets of materials, known as open education resources, are
revising and churning out new academic guides with the
common core in mind.
For instance, one of the biggest names in that field, the
nonprofit Khan Academy, recently released new adaptive
and interactive math resources linked to the standards, a
move that could herald the likely shift of open education
providers into offering more sophisticated optio