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719516 research-article2017

EPXXXX10.1177/0895904817719516Educational PolicySupovitz and McGuinn

Article

Interest Group Activity in the Context of Common Core Implementation

Educational Policy 1–33 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904817719516 DOI: 10.1177/0895904817719516 journals.sagepub.com/home/epx

Jonathan Supovitz1 and Patrick McGuinn2

Abstract This article analyzes the messages and strategies of a sample of education interest groups, and assesses their interpretations of the political context to understand how the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) lost both political and public support during the crucial period of 2013-2014. Based on interviews with representatives of 19 interest groups who were actively involved in communicating about the standards, it focuses on the arguments, communication strategies, and targeted audiences of professional advocacy groups, policy membership organizations, and testing organizations. Our findings identify six themes that contributed to the climate of increased partisanship and politicization, and helped shape perceptions about the Common Core, both within the education sector and among the broader public. We argue that these policy factors, strategic factors, and contextual factors played an important role in shaping the environment within which the CCSS were being understood and implemented. Keywords educational policy, education reform, politics of education, Common Core

1University 2Drew

of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA University, Madison, NJ, USA

Corresponding Author: Jonathan Supovitz, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Email: [email protected]

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Educational Policy 00(0)

Introduction The journey of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) began with blue skies and buoyant prospects. As the centerpiece of American education reform following the test-based accountability era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the CCSS were developed and adopted at a brisk clip. In 2010, a mere 30 months after they were first conceived, the CCSS were adopted with bipartisan support by legislatures in 45 states and the District of Columbia. But only 3 years later, storm clouds gathered and the forecast grew dark. Beginning in 2013, the CCSS faced an increasingly murky future, as implementation challenges and political controversy sapped their public support. The standards became a political lightning rod, with spirited opposition at both ends of the political spectrum. In this article, we analyze the messages and strategies of a range of education interest groups, and assess their interpretations of the political context to understand how the CCSS lost both political and public support during the crucial year of 2013-2014. The study is based on interviews with representatives of 19 interest groups, largely supportive of the CCSS, who were actively involved in communicating about the standards. It focuses on the arguments, communication strategies, and targeted audiences of professional advocacy groups, policy membership organizations, and testing organizations. Our findings identify six themes that contributed to the political climate of increased partisanship and politicization, and helped shape perceptions about the Common Core, both within the education sector and among the broader public. We have organized these themes into three overarching categories: policy factors, strategic factors, and contextual factors—each of which, we argue, played an important role in shaping the environment within which the CCSS were being understood and implemented.

Literature Review At the center of the policymaking process is a complex set of interactions among politicians, policymakers, interest groups, and perceptions of public preference, all nestled within a political milieu. The influence of each of these factors coalesces in different proportions into a process of agenda setting, policy formulation, and policy enactment (Kingdon & Thurber, 1984). Even then, the formulation of policy does not stop, as policies are adjusted and interpreted during the implementation process (Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002; Weatherly & Lipsky, 1977; Supovitz, 2008). In a democratic system, groups that advocate for particular policies play a crucial role in shaping public opinion and mobilizing citizen support. Phillips

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(2006) argued that “in a pluralistic society, the diversity of input into political and social debates by . . . advocacy organizations both contributes to and enhances the representation of ideas and values, thus contributing to a strong and genuine democracy” (p. 62). The tradition of external groups organizing efforts to exert influence on American policy is a long and honored one, going back to Madison’s (1787) desire to balance factions in The Federalist Papers. In the most general terms, advocacy organizations are interest groups independent of formal governing institutions who attempt to influence the actions of government (Burstein, 1998; Walker, 1991). Andrews and Edwards (2004) defined advocacy groups as those who “make public interest claims either promoting or resisting social change that, if implemented, would conflict with the social, cultural, political, or economic interests or values of other constituencies and groups” (p. 481). Interest groups can take different shapes and serve different purposes. Social movement organizations typically focus on the pursuit of the public good (Zald & McCarthy, 1987). Ideological advocacy groups, often in the form of think tanks or policy institutes, tend to be ideologically driven and have a particular social agenda (Weaver, 1989). Lobbying organizations are those that focus their attention on legislators with the goal of influencing their votes (Hopkins, 1991). Grass-roots organizations are usually volunteer-run nonprofits (D. H. Smith, 2000). Professional member organizations inform and advocate for the interests of their members (Andrews & Edwards, 2004). Two of the characteristics that help distinguish between different types of interest groups are membership and tactics. Interest groups have a range of membership models. Some have individual members, some have organizational members, some have a mixture of the two, and some have no members at all (Edwards & Foley, 2002). While membership is sometimes a source of funding, advocacy-oriented philanthropies are increasingly using their resources to support particular positions, groups, and initiatives (Reckhow, 2012; Scott, 2009). Some advocacy organizations have professional corporate structures with paid staff, while others rely on more grass-roots volunteer support (Walker, 1991). Interest groups employ a variety of tactics in their efforts to influence policymaking and implementation. Some use their resources and social networks to gain access to people in key powerful positions. Others focus on mobilizing public opinion under the theory that elected officials are responsive to the preferences of their constituents. Yet, others share information with policymakers with the intent of encouraging a preferred response. The ubiquity of the Internet and the rise of social media have also enabled different means of communication. The personalization of social media has allowed for greater targeting of messages and changed the patterns of participation (Bennett,

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2012). Bennett and Segerberg (2012) went so far as to argue that social media personalizes the action frames of policy advocates to the extent that we are shifting from an era of collective action to one of connective action. Finally, adding to the complexity, the circumstances and forces that produce a particular policy are themselves a subset of a larger confluence of events that include both prior historical flows and conjoint streams of other related issues. Heclo (1974) observed policy formulation and change as a combination of large-scale social, political, and economic activity and the interactions between individuals within the policy sphere who compete for power by engaging with policy problems. Sabatier (1988) posited that policy change required thinking “in time perspectives of a decade or more” and should focus on “policy subsystems”; that is, “those actors from a variety of public and private organizations who are actively concerned with a policy problem or issue” (p. 131). Similarly, Pierson’s (2004) political analyses emphasized the interactions (or what he called conjunctures) of particular events and the “slow moving aspects of the social world” (p. 13). All of this is to say that the dynamics of the policy process are operating simultaneously and interactively on a range of individual, social, and temporal planes.

Conceptual Framework Informed by political science and public policy literature, the conceptual framework for this study conceives of the policymaking process as an ecosystem that contains this process surrounded by a diverse set of interest groups that press upon, and thereby shape it. These sets of actors, actions, and their interactions are themselves influenced by larger historical and cultural forces. This policymaking ecosystem is shown in Figure 1. The framework places the policymaking process at the center of a set of concentric rings of groups and forces that exert pressure on the process at a particular period in time. The center of the figure shows a summation of the policymaking process of agenda setting, policy design, policy enactment, and policy implementation (Kingdon & Thurber, 1984). Policy implementation is an important part of the policymaking process because of the influences local implementers have on interpreting and enacting reform (Spillane et al., 2002; Weatherly & Lipsky, 1977; Supovitz, 2008). The arrow from implementation to agenda setting refers to the iterative nature of the policymaking process, whereby policies continue to be contested and adjusted over time. In Figure 1, the first ring outside the policymaking process depicts three major sets of actors that are pressing on the politicians and the professional policy class that are centrally charged with creating and initiating policy.


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Figure 1. The policymaking ecosystem.

The first—professional advocacy groups—are those interest groups that benefit or have a particular interest in influencing the policymaking outcome on a particular issue (Andrews & Edwards, 2004). These might include social movement organizations, ideological advocacy organizations, or lobbying organizations. The second interest group comprises member associations, that is, professional associations whose membership has a stated interest in a particular policy issue. These groups either advocate directly for a particular policy, or are ones whose members are otherwise affected by a policy and seek to inform and interpret it for their members. The third group—the activist public—is a relatively new set of impassioned actors who are highly invested in the policy issue and use social media to mobilize public opinion (Supovitz, Daly, & Del Fresno, 2015). Collectively, we can think of the actors in this ring around the policymaking process as interest groups that have a stake in the shape and direction a reform takes. In the ring outside these interest groups are the factors that influence the policymaking environment: the news and information producers and public opinion. The former includes two classes of media: First, there is the

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professional media, which include network and cable broadcast stations, talk radio, newspapers, magazines and other print journalism, as well as Internet news outlets. The second class of media is the increasingly vociferous crowdsourced social media, which includes a variety of forums where individuals and groups share information and their beliefs with others. This ring also reflects the nebulous entity called “public opinion” which is the general mood and opinions held by the broader populace as reflected in public opinion polls. Finally, at the bottom of the figure we show a series of these processes to represent the continuous nature of policymaking. Past policies contribute to the learning process of policymakers and also provide context to the environment in which current policy is formulated. As reflected in the work of Heclo (1974), Sabatier (1988), and Pierson (2004), policy must be understood within the arc of time. Kingdon and Thurber (1984) called this the “policy primeval soup.” Much as molecules floated around in what biologists call the “primeval soup” before life came into being, so ideas float around in these [policy] communities. Many ideas are possible, much as many molecules would be possible. Ideas become prominent and then fade . . . ideas are floated, bills introduced, speeches made, proposals are drafted, then amended in response to reaction and floated again, Kingdon and Thurber explained. (pp. 116-117) In this way, policy development operates in multiple time frames, and the present is not disconnected from the past.

Backdrop for the CCSS Movement As reflected in the conceptual framework, the particular history of a policy area provides an essential context for understanding present-day actions. To understand the CCSS debate, it is important to recognize that education reformers have repeatedly attempted to use standards as a lever for educational improvement. Education policymakers in the 1980s created a set of baseline expectations which they intended schools to use as a foundation for performance. Codified in minimum competency tests, these focused on a set of basic skills that schools were expected to have all students meet (Murphy, 1990; Pipho, 1978). However, these basic expectations often became the aspirations for instruction, and the lesson policymakers took from this era was that low expectations produced low performance. This was the central finding of the seminal 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” which warned in stark terms that the country’s educational outcomes had declined relative to our international competitors.


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This led to a shift in emphasis from minimal to high expectations. Although there were different interpretations in theory and practice, the systemic reform efforts of the 1990s were built around three general principles: First, ambitious standards developed by each state would provide targets of what students should know and be able to do at key grade junctures. Second, states measured progress toward standards by developing aligned assessments that combined rewards and sanctions for holding educators accountable to the standards. The third component was local flexibility in organizing capacity to determine how best to meet the academic expectations (M. S. Smith & O’Day, 1991; Vinovskis, 1996). This structure of clear goals (standards), measures (assessments), and incentives (accountability) at the state level, combined with implementation autonomy, fits in with America’s historical conception of education as a locally organized effort. This was supported by the redirecting of federal dollars in the 1990s toward state efforts to raise academic standards (McGuinn, 2006). The development of standards and assessments in each state produced variation in the quality and rigor of state educational systems across the country, which contributed to a perception of disappointment with the reforms of the 1990s (Hamilton, Stecher, & Yuan, 2008). The 2000s gave rise to a focus on testing as the driving force for holding schools and districts accountable for meeting standards. The 2001 passage of the NCLB Act inaugurated an expansion of testing by requiring states that received federal funding to assess students annually in all grades between third and eighth, and 1 year in high school. NCLB pressed states to develop plans to have all schools make adequate yearly progress with a target of 100% proficiency by 2014—an endeavor that would prove impossible. Research on schools pressed by test-based accountability showed both productive and unproductive responses, including increased attention to tested subjects, a rise in test preparation, and more attention to students just at the cusp of passing the test. Some states gamed the system by creating tests that most students could easily pass, and there were several high-profile cases of systematic cheating by educators in districts and schools. The test-based accountability movement can be seen as an attempt to tighten the linkages in the theory of standards-based reform by increasing student performance expectations via high-stakes testing, holding schools accountable for meeting standards (Supovitz, 2009; Hamilton, 2003). This experience left many policymakers convinced that although pressure was important, we could not just squeeze higher performance out of the system without an infrastructure to support it (Cohen & Moffit, 2009). This brings us to the present major reform initiative in the United States—the CCSS. The CCSS in mathematics and English language arts

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(ELA) were developed on behalf of a group of organizations led by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). The CCSS set forth what students should know and be able to do in mathematics and ELA at each grade level from kindergarten to 12th grade. The development of the CCSS began in 2009 and incorporated a number of lessons learned from the earlier standards-based reform movement (McDonnell & Weatherford, 2013). The new standards were named the “Common Core” because they were intended to eliminate the variation in the quality of state standards experienced in the 1990s. They were developed at the behest of the state governors and chief state school officers to avoid the charge of federal intrusion—which came nonetheless after the Obama administration incentivized states to adopt the CCSS with the Race to the Top (RTTT) funding competition and provided the financing for the Common Core testing consortia. In a remarkable moment of bipartisanship, the CCSS were adopted by the legislatures in 46 states and the District of Columbia in 2010.1 Since then, the CCSS have become increasingly controversial, with Indiana and Oklahoma backing out and several other states (including Missouri, New Jersey, Tennessee, and West Virginia) developing new standards to replace the Common Core. More than half of the states have withdrawn from the associated Common Core–aligned test consortia (Jochim & McGuinn, 2016).

Political Context at Time of Study A series of important events occurred between the time of the introduction of the CCSS in 2010 and the time of data collection for this study, which occurred between October 2013 and February 2014. These events contributed to the pace of reform adoption as well as policymaker and public perceptions of the CCSS. First, the severe recession of 2008 spurred the economic stimulus of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, which included funding for the RTTT competition. Forty-six of the 50 states submitted applications for RTTT,2 which included a provision that states adopt rigorous standards, and eventually awarded more than US$4.1 billion to 19 states. This carrot in a time of hunger helped induce states to adopt the CCSS (McDermott, 2012). Second, the RTTT funds also provided more than US$350 million in seed money for the two test consortia—the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)—to develop assessments aligned with the CCSS (Center for K-12 Assessment and Performance Management, 2014).


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Third, a series of developments created an impression of a foundering reform movement (McGuinn, 2015). These developments included Florida’s September 2013 decision to no longer serve as the fiscal agent for the PARCC development process and to drop its plans to use the assessment; Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s seemingly offhand comment about suburban moms realizing that their kids are not quite as well educated they thought they were (Strauss, 2013); and the head of the National Education Association’s call in February 2014 to “course correct the standards” (Layton, 2014). Also, by 2013, more than half of the governors who were in office when their states adopted the standards (and were members of the NGA, a sponsor of the CCSS) were no longer in the governorship. There was also growing resistance in several states about continuing to use the CCSS (McGuinn & Supovitz, 2016). In 2013, there were 11 states (Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee) where legislation was introduced by Republicans to repeal adoption of the Common Core. In Louisiana, Republican Governor Jindal issued an executive order removing the state from the CCSS, which forced a legal battle with the State Board of Education over authority for state policy. In March 2014, Indiana became the first adopter to drop the CCSS, when Governor Mike Pence signed legislation withdrawing the state from the Common Core (Banchero, 2014). Oklahoma and South Carolina dropped the CCSS in June 2014. Chances seemed tenuous for the survival of the CCSS. The timing of our data collection also coincided with a period in which public support for the Common Core was declining and becoming increasingly partisan. Figure 2 shows Education Next survey results of support and opposition to the CCSS, both overall and by political affiliation. In 2012, 63% of respondents supported the CCSS. From 2013 to 2014, support declined from 65% to 54%. At the same time, while Democratic support remained in the low 60% range, Republican support declined 14 points, from 57% to 43%. Another indicator of increasingly partisan public opinion was the growth in activity surrounding the Common Core on Twitter. In a study of Twitter activity covering the same 6-month period (October 2013-February 2014), Supovitz, Daly, & Del Fresno (2015) found that there were almost 5 times as many tweets expressing opposition to the CCSS as there were tweets supporting the CCSS. In addition, many of the negative opinions expressed about the CCSS came from activists outside of education who were opposed on a host of non-education-related grounds, including concerns about data privacy, the role of private businesses in education, and federal intrusion into states’ rights.

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Figure 2. Trends in Common Core support 2012-2015. Source. Education Next survey.

Study Overview and Research Questions This study investigates the messages, strategies, and views of a sample of key interest group leaders who had a stake in the enactment of the CCSS. The groups represented in the sample were either supporters of the CCSS or ones whose membership had a vested interest in the implementation of the CCSS. The focus of the research was to understand how CCSS interest groups were strategizing to support CCSS implementation, and how they interpreted this particularly volatile and crucial period in the implementation of the CCSS. More specifically, the investigation focused on three research questions: Research Question 1: What were the messages of Common Core–aligned interest groups? Research Question 2: What strategies did Common Core–aligned interest groups use to send their message? Research Question 3: How did these interest groups understand the challenges in the environment at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014? The remainder of this section describes the sample, data collection, and analytic approach.

Sample Our sample consisted of representatives of three types of interest groups that were involved in CCSS outreach activities. The sample was identified in three ways: First, we scanned the environment of groups with visible


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positions in support of or informing their constituencies about the CCSS. Second, we capitalized upon our experience studying CCSS implementation and our prior relationships with some of the organizations in the sample. Third, we used a snowball technique, whereby we ended interviews asking respondents about other groups we might talk to. Our final sample included leaders of 19 organizations, which represented three distinct organizational types: 1. Education Advocacy Groups (n = 11) were groups that had actively supported the CCSS and considered it part of their mission to advocate on its behalf. These organizations included 50 CAN (50 State Campaign for Achievement Now), The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Achieve, The Alliance for Excellent Education, Democrats for Education Reform, Foundation for Excellence in Education, The Hunt Institute, The Business Roundtable (Education and Workforce Committee), Foundation for Florida’s Future, Stand for Children, and the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA). 2. Policy Member Groups (n = 5) were education policy member groups that either supported the CCSS or considered it part of their mission to inform their membership about the reform efforts. These included the National Council of State Legislators (NCSL), National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), CCSSO, and NGA, National School Boards Association (NSBA). 3. Testing Groups (n = 3) were groups that played a role in educational testing and had an interest in the assessments related to the CCSS. These groups included the PARCC, SBAC, and the College Board. It should be noted that the CCSSO, NGA, and Achieve were also sponsors of the CCSS development process. The CCSSO and NGA, being policy member groups, had additional motivations to advocate for the CCSS to their members.

Data Collection and Analytic Approach Data collection occurred between October 2013 and February 2014. Overall, 19 telephone interviews were conducted with representatives of the sample of organizations. In some cases, we interviewed the leaders of the organizations, but in other cases, given the focus on communication strategies, we interviewed the communications director or outreach coordinators for the organization.

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The interviews followed a structured protocol that also allowed flexibility for the interviewers to follow up on topics that emerged and to probe particular strands of the conversation (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009; J. A. Maxwell, 2008). The interview protocol had four sections: The first section asked respondents to briefly describe their organization and their role. The second included a dozen questions about the organization’s work around the Common Core. These included the organization’s position on the CCSS, their target audiences and the arguments they used with those audiences, the approaches they used to spread their message, and who, if anybody, they were collaborating with. The third section focused on variation in their communication approaches by either state, region, or targeted audience. The fourth asked the respondents to analyze the broader landscape, including who they saw as the major players in the national CCSS debate (either supporters or opposition), how they felt the political environment was evolving, and what explained these developments. The interviews concluded by asking respondents to suggest other people we might talk with. The two coauthors conducted all the interviews, splitting them up according to prior relationships and availability. All interviews were digitally recorded with the permission of the interviewee and transcribed. When respondents wanted to speak off the record, we turned off the recorder. After conducting the interviews, both authors made an initial reading through the full set of transcripts to develop a comprehensive picture across the interviews, and had a discussion of themes and impressions in accordance with the inductive qualitative approach described by J. A. Maxwell (2008). We then created data reduction tables for each interview (Miles & Huberman, 1994) that included (a) organization type, (b) message(s) about standards, (c) communication strategies, (d) target audiences, (e) challenges, (f) mentions of testing, and (g) perceptions of policy environment. We then read across these categories, tallying common approaches and identifying unique perspectives and common themes. To be identified as a theme, the point had to be made by at least two respondents.

Results We organize the results of this article into two overarching sections: First, we describe the messages of the interest groups about the CCSS, who they targeted as the audiences for their messages, and the outreach approaches of organizations in the sample. Second, we analyze and synthesize the respondents’ explanations of the shifting political context surrounding Common Core implementation.

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Supovitz and McGuinn Table 1. List of Messages Mentioned by Study Organizations to Describe the Purpose of the CCSS. Message about CCSS 1. Higher quality: The CCSS are of higher quality than previous state standards 2. Better preparation: Kids should graduate prepared for next step, either college or career 3. Economic competitiveness: The United States needs to become more economically competitive, both nationally and internationally 4. Alignment of standards and accountability: The CCSS represent higher standards and greater and aligned accountability. This is a long-held position that we represent 5. Equity: The CCSS create equitable opportunity for low-income students 6. State-led: The CCSS are state-led and voluntary 7. Mobile society: We live in a mobile society, and CCSS help transient and military families 8. Collaborative: Different state standards are an impediment to collaboration across states

Interest group using this message Advocacy groups (7) Advocacy groups (4), policy group (1) Advocacy groups (3), policy groups (2) Advocacy groups (2)

Advocacy group (1) Advocacy group (1), policy group (1) Advocacy group (1) Advocacy group (1)

Note. CCSS = Common Core State Standards.

Messages About the CCSS One of the focal points of our interviews with organization leaders was to ask what arguments they were using to describe the CCSS to their constituents. A summary of the arguments they reported using with their target audiences is shown in Table 1. The results are presented in descending order of their frequency of mention. Respondents could, and often did, say that they used multiple arguments in their work. In a few cases, particularly with the policy member and testing groups, the respondents felt that it was not their role to report information about the CCSS but to advocate for them. The three most commonly used messages about the standards—that they are of higher quality, that they will produce better prepared students, and that they are required for economic competition—were used by most of the advocacy groups and members of the other groups as well. These have long been the bread-and-butter arguments about the value of standards—raising the level of inputs and outputs, necessary due to external pressure. The first of these

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arguments focuses on the standards themselves (higher quality), contending that the current rendition of the standards is important because they are substantially better than previous incarnations. The second argument (better preparation) implies that the resulting quality of student performance will improve due to a better set of expectations. The third common argument (economic competitiveness) focuses on exogenous pressures for raising expectations and appeals to those who prioritize the economic benefits of education. Together, these three represent the major arguments supporting the need for standards. The fourth message—the importance of aligning standards and assessments to produce a coherent accountability system—is one that was used by representatives of two of the advocacy groups. As one of the advocacy group interviewees summarized, The basic logic is that we need to have high expectations for students and we need to have tests that check on how they’re doing and that are aligned with those high expectations and then some accountability for schools, for teachers.

This argument hearkens back to the standards reform theory of the 1990s (M. S. Smith & O’Day, 1991). The final three messages on the list are new ones that are particular to characteristics of the CCSS. The fact that the standards were state-led, rather than federal, is an artifact of having one set of standards. The contention that the CCSS better serve a more mobile society is an argument particularly targeted for military families and families in urban areas, because their children are more likely to move to different states during their childhood. The argument about teacher collaboration across jurisdictions seems particularly related to the opportunities created by technology that are new to the era of the Common Core. Finally, it is important to note that two of the four policy member groups viewed their role as providing information for their members, not advocating support for the CCSS. As a representative of one of these groups said, Our position is and always has been that we support state innovations and support states for dealing with these kinds of issues, but we would definitely oppose any kind of federalizing of standards. As long as it stays state-led and a voluntary state initiative, then we support what the states decide to do.

Target Audiences In our interviews, we also sought to know who the different interest groups were targeting with their CCSS messages. Table 2 shows our categorization

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Table 2. Target Audiences of CCSS Messages, Organized by Interest Group Type. Target audience National policymakers: Congress State policymakers, including governors, state legislators, state board members, state DOEs District policymakers, including district board members and administrators Public Business community Educators

Interest group targeting this audience Advocacy group (1) Advocacy groups (7), policy groups (4) Advocacy groups (3) Advocacy groups (6) Advocacy groups (2), test group (1) Test groups (2)

Note. CCSS = Common Core State Standards; DOE = departments of education.

of their responses. Many interest groups mentioned multiple target audiences in their interviews, and these are reflected in the table. We were not surprised to find the overall focus on policymakers, considering the policy member groups in our sample. But we were surprised that very few of the advocacy groups in our sample were targeting a more general audience with their messages. This was to have important political consequences as it allowed opponents to define the Common Core to the public in negative terms during the 2013-2014 period with little countervailing messaging. Of the education advocacy groups, the largest focus was on state policymakers, which included governors, state legislators, state board members, and state departments of education. This audience was also the target of four of the five policy member groups. This makes sense, considering that during the time of the study most debates about standards adoption were occurring at the state level. State legislators in particular were a focus of attention, as CCSS proponents sought to defeat the many attempts to repeal the Common Core: “We have been much more attentive to state legislatures who were not as much involved in the Common Core effort in the beginning,” said one advocacy group interviewee. Another group targeted Republican governors and state legislators to keep their support in more conservative states: “We know we are not going to win over the Tea Party folks, but what we are trying to do is keep the Republican legislators and Republican governors on board,” said an advocacy group leader. A different advocacy group representative pointed out that much of their attention was specifically focused on state procurement or budget committees which were deciding whether and how much funding to allocate to CCSS adoption.

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Table 3. Web-Based Media and Other Communication Strategies Mentioned by Study Respondents to Communicate Their Messages to Their Constituencies. Digital media strategies •• Communication toolkits which were distinct for different audiences •• Online parent guides •• Online assessment guides specific to each state •• Infographics •• PowerPoint presentations •• Facts and myths •• Social media, including Twitter and Facebook •• Creating specific websites geared to informing people about the CCSS •• Blogging •• Posting podcasts or video segments Communication strategies •• Direct lobbying of legislators •• Providing briefing materials to specific policy audiences •• Testifying at state-level committee hearings Other media and communication strategies •• TV and radio ads •• Participating in talk radio shows •• Newspaper op-eds •• Sponsoring polls Note. CCSS = Common Core State Standards.

Messaging Strategies Digital media were the messaging tools of choice for the interest groups in our sample. Each group, particularly the advocacy groups, relied on Internetbased media to communicate their messages. As one interest group leader characterized their modus operandi, which could sum up the approach for the entire sample, “We are using an aggressive digital strategy.” Table 3 shows a list of media and communication strategies that the interest groups in our sample described. Electronic media has created the opportunity to produce and post a large variety of materials targeted for specific audiences such as parents, teachers, state board members, and local education authority administrators. One thing that was particularly notable in our interviews was the attention that the interest groups paid to producing materials for their target audiences that were specific for particular groups. For example, the National PTA-produced assessment guides that were specific to each state; Stand for Children produced colorful infographic that compared old and new standards and


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assessments and pointed out the differences; Achieve presented a set of myths and facts for people to separate out claims and realities about the standards; Alliance for Excellent Education brought out a series of videos of panel discussions with educators and policymakers on the differences between the CCSS and prior standards and the affordances of the new standards; the Business Roundtable posted an open letter to the state governors about the need of business for a more educated workforce and the role of the standards in producing that workforce; the Foundation for Excellence in Education produced a nifty interactive database for policymakers to view pending education legislation in each of the 50 states. Second, advocacy groups reported a set of strategies to influence state and local policymakers. These included developing briefing materials; identifying key legislators in the states, reaching out to them to provide information and talking points and offer assistance; and testifying at state legislative hearings: “We have been much more attentive to state legislatures who were not as much involved in the CC effort in the beginning,” one advocacy group leader explained as a shift in strategy. As the Common Core became an issue in the states, another advocacy group leader said that they began to play hardball: Playing hardball means talking to the Speaker of the House, the President of the Senate, and the Governor’s Office and the President of the State Board or the elected State Superintendent and basically seeing what we need to do to help sustain these standards.

The third part of Table 3 shows other media strategies that interest groups reported using. These included radio and television advertising, participating in radio conversations, writing newspaper op-eds, sponsoring and reporting surveys about the CCSS, and writing and delivering briefing materials for specific policymaker audiences. While only a subset of the groups reported using these strategies, they are notable because they are more active than the passive strategies, such as making information available on their websites, that formed the basis of much of the groups’ advocacy work.

Analysis of the Political Context Through an analysis of interviews with different interest group representatives, we identified six themes that contributed to the political milieu that had helped shape perceptions of the Common Core both within the education sector and larger public opinion, as well as the increased political partisanship. We have organized these themes into three overarching categories:

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policy factors, strategic factors, and contextual factors—each of which has played a role in shaping the environment within which the CCSS were being understood and implemented. In this section, we describe each theme and provide supporting evidence from the data.

Policy Factors There were two policy-related factors that were discussed in the interviews that respondents believed contributed to the shifting political environment in late 2013 and early 2014. These were the enmeshed nature of standards, which touch on many different policy areas; and the ambitiousness of this reform effort to reach beyond low-performing schools to influence the instructional experiences of children in all communities. •• Standards are relatively noncontroversial, but the CCSS touched on many sensitive policy issues. Educational standards in and of themselves are not controversial. Virtually everyone supports the notion that our education system ought to promote an explicit set of expectations about what children should know and be able to do at key junctures of their educational experiences. Such standards for performance play an important role in providing guidance for students, teachers, schools, and systems, and catalyze the organization of a variety of education support activities, including curriculum materials and professional development for teachers (see Supovitz, Daly, & Del Fresno, 2015, introduction). What is controversial is who sets the standards and what gets connected to them, particularly around accountability for school outcomes. Several interviewees noted that standards themselves are not controversial. After all, one individual rhetorically asked, “Who could be against high expectations for students?” Respondents also noted that very few of the critiques of the standards that they saw coming from opposition groups had to do with the content of the standards, instead, most of the criticism of the CCSS was connected to other policy issues. As one representative of a policy member group stated, “The Common Core touches on so many different policy areas that you have to be aware of the connections that people make.” Some of the reservations that CCSS supporters mentioned coming from opponents of the standards included (a) federal intrusion into state policy, (b) the connection between standards and data collection and therefore privacy concerns, (c) the post-NCLB sensitivity to overtesting, (d) the blurring of the distinction between standards and curriculum, and (e) the sensitivity on


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anything connected to the Obama administration. As one of the advocacy group representatives commented, Standards are such a wonky issue and the facts are so wonky. Traditionally, the public is not going to see changes in state standards and for good reasons. It’s just a technical thing. Most people don’t know what Common Core is. They support the concept behind Common Core, rigorous common standards. But the way the opposition has framed it up . . . just sort of spreading myths. They create a lot of hot-button myths that will connect with the public so it’s all sorts of you know, crazy data intrusions, or an Obama conspiracy, or all these things that people are already fired up about in a populist way, and try to make it about that.

Several of the interest groups reported spending a lot of time correcting or counteracting what they saw as misinformation or “myths” about the standards. The CCSSO, Achieve, the National PTA, and the Foundation for Excellence in Education all said that they tracked and corrected myths about the standards for their members. “Information fights fear,” one advocacy group leader said when explaining this effort. Other interviewees, however, lamented that information could not fight ideology very effectively, and CCSS opponents often relied on passionate rhetorical arguments rather than debate the standards on the merits. Standards are chosen by reformers as a powerful lever to catalyze change because they are connected to so many different areas of education and have implications for so many aspects of the education system, including funding, curriculum, assessment, and the organization of instructional time. Ironically, these very reasons also created the opportunity for opponents of reform to attack the implications of the reform rather than the reform itself. The diverse set of opponents of the CCSS took advantage of these many connections to successfully redefine the issue of educational standards and connect it to a variety of hot-button issues that brought together a disparate coalition of opposition (Supovitz, Daly, & Del Fresno, 2015; McGuinn & Supovitz, 2016). •• The CCSS influenced all schools, not just low-performing ones. The major national reform of the 2000s, that is, the test-based accountability approach of NCLB 2001, focused attention primarily on schools that were low performing. As performance is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status, NCLB shone its spotlight brightest on schools that were in urban and rural areas, and largely left suburban middle- and upper-class public schools alone. While the NCLB requirement for disaggregating subgroup performance did

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identify some schools in middle- and upper-class communities as making inadequate progress, the reform pressed hardest on schools with students and parents from less privileged backgrounds. With its shifts toward more conceptual understanding in mathematics and evidence-grounded argumentation in ELA, the Common Core was designed to challenge schools across the performance spectrum—suburban, urban, and rural schools alike. By design, this affected not only traditionally low-performing schools but schools at higher performance levels as well. This approach began causing friction in traditionally well-performing communities who questioned the new standards movement on both technical and political grounds. It mobilized wealthier, better informed, and more politically powerful suburban parents to voice their discontent to policymakers, school administrators, and the media. Ongoing implementation challenges, the continuation of high-stakes testing, concerns about potential test score drops, and the movement to teacher-level accountability all added fuel to the growing discontent, which converged upon and became embodied in the standards themselves. In addition, the rise of social media, social networking, and sharing device gave more voluble voice to middle- and upper-class parents, school leaders, and a range of social activists (Supovitz, Daly, & Del Fresno, 2015). Several of the respondents noted the ways in which the CCSS were challenging traditionally well-performing schools. As one advocacy group leader exclaimed, There’s a lot of suburban America that is learning for the first time that things aren’t going as well as they thought they were in their kids’ schools. And . . . it’s becoming clear that there are zones in America where a lot of taxpayers and parents don’t want to hear about what’s happening in their schools.

Another national advocacy group leader, interviewed on November 4, 2013, sounded a similar refrain when he described what he perceived as a class distinction in responses to the CCSS movement: We’re dealing with tremendous backlash. It’s not coming from urban parts of states. It’s coming from the suburban areas and the backlash is against raising the bar and really is in favor of the status quo and has been pretty powerful. I get the impression of the soccer moms’ understanding—they’re just insulted that their kids are being told they’re not as smart as they thought they were.

The line about soccer moms was eerily similar to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s infamous remarks in Richmond, Virginia on November 15, 2013, to a group of state superintendents at a CCSSO conference. At the


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meeting, Duncan was quoted as saying that some of the opposition to the Common Core was coming from “white suburban moms who—all of a sudden—their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were” (Strauss, 2013). What is particularly striking is the fact that Duncan’s public remarks came 2 weeks after this private interview. This suggests that Duncan’s seemingly off-the-cuff statement may have really been the verbalization of a sentiment going around in democratic policy circles about the middle-class pushback against the CCSS.

Strategic Factors In our analysis of the interest group interview data, three themes emerged about the strategic decisions of CCSS advocates that respondents believed contributed to the growing anti-CCSS sentiment in late 2013 and early 2014. These were as follows: a strategic failure to define the standards issue in the quiet period from 2010 to 2012, when the CCSS were adopted by 46 of the 50 states and visible opposition had not yet emerged; the emphasis of advocacy groups on informing state and local policymakers rather than the broader public in their outreach efforts; and tactical efforts that utilized contemporary electronic media, but in traditional and largely passive ways. •• Early quiet lulled supporters, who failed to launch an aggressive preemptive campaign. The CCSS were conceived, developed, and adopted by the states in rapid succession. What began as a discussion of the weaknesses of the 50 state-derived standards system in 2008 quickly turned to a development process for a common set of standards sponsored by the NGA, CCSSO, and Achieve (Reed, 2015). The strategic approach of using a state-led process for a common set of standards gained widespread and early bipartisan support, and culminated in the near universal state adoption of the CCSS in 2010 by 46 states and the District of Columbia (McDonnell & Weatherford, 2013). Early opposition to the Common Core was scattered and diffused, and got scant attention from the mainstream media (Rothman, 2011). This created the impression that the standards movement would proceed without substantial controversy. As one of the education advocacy group leaders said, Shame on us really, because it was very naïve. There were always these handfuls of people . . . harping about the standards. But for two years that was it. It didn’t really get much beyond that. And then all of a sudden it just happened very fast that they managed to sort of light a fire with the Tea Party.

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I think it was largely the Republican Congressional Committee resolution, it was the Glen Beck influence, Michelle Malkin and so on—it suddenly happened very fast. I think we were just kind of lulled into thinking that the resistance was going to be fairly marginalized and not a huge threat. I think many of us would say we expected there to be some backlash from the right but not for it to be as politicized as it eventually became.

Several of the interviewees noted that the quiet early implementation period and the lack of controversy contributed to a perception of widespread support—even though polls showed that few Americans knew about the Common Core at that time (L. A. Maxwell, 2013)—and resulted in a low sense of urgency and advocacy groups expanded relatively few resources defining the message of the Common Core: “I think there is massive underinvestment in Common Core advocacy between 2010 and 2012,” concluded an advocacy group leader. As a consequence of the low profile of the CCSS, the diverse array of organizations involved, and the diffuse ownership of the standards, several respondents noted that the messaging campaigns were disconnected and discordant. An advocacy group leader said, This is a fight that escalated quickly that seemed to sort of overwhelm everyone and . . . no one ever built any kind of coordinating thing that stuck from the beginning with the right people at the table that would meet and figure out the strategy around this . . .

Another similarly commented, When it became clear that there was going to be stiff opposition, people ran around throwing money everywhere, you know, trying to play catch up and there wasn’t . . . a lot of relationship-building and information-building, not even a really clear sense of like what do we need to do to win this, and what would it look like. Unlike, say, the slow and steady approach to advancing vouchers, or supporting charter reform. You just can’t start up a movement in short order from scratch.

Many attributed the decline in support for the standards to the lack of a coherent and coordinated messaging campaign in the early rollout period. •• Advocates focused on policymakers rather than the public, and lack of a concerted message ceded the public message to CCSS opponents. As noted in the earlier section of this article that set the political context for the study, growing public awareness of the CCSS led to higher opposition to


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the standards and an increasingly partisan split along political party lines. Two factors mentioned by respondents seemed to contribute to this phenomenon: First, as shown in the analysis of interest group target audiences, most of the interviewed interest group leaders focused their attention on policy audiences rather than the public at large. In addition, those that did public messaging often did so as a secondary emphasis. While this may be an artifact of the study sample, we also saw it as a strategic choice on the part of the CCSS-supporting interest groups. One of the challenges of public outreach is the imprecise nature of defining exactly who comprise “the public,” and what messages will effectively influence their opinion. The public visibility of education reform issues is usually not very high, and it does not seem that many of the interest groups we talked to were prepared for such a highly visible, contentious, and ideological public debate. Several of the advocacy groups in our sample, including those that were targeting the public, such as Stand for Children and the National PTA, reported that they were spending more time, attention, and resources on CCSS advocacy than they had on any previous reform effort in their histories. As the PTA reported, “There is no other education reform issue that we have produced as many tools on, even more than we did on vouchers in the nineties.” Even so, the nature of standards as a reform issue makes it a difficult one to communicate. As mentioned previously, the standards do not exactly make for an exciting rallying cry or an issue that people would naturally gravitate toward (or against). The supporters of the CCSS struggled to identify some aspect of standards they could advocate for (as witnessed by the multitude of messages they reported using) that would ignite support. As one interviewee noted, I think the movement for the Common Core was so below the radar that there never was a natural public constituency in favor of it, calling for it, so the responsibility sort of fell on the lap of a lot of state departments of education, and they are not marketing people, they are not political people. They are technocrats and they developed a very technocratic message that fell on deaf ears. We were so below the radar screen that I’m not sure anybody was really for it.

Moreover, although many of the groups in our study knew each other and had regular contact about communication strategy, several of the respondents felt that there was no organized and systemic campaign to sway public opinion about the CCSS. As one advocacy group leader said,

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We have not mounted the kind of really expensive, concerted, multi-million dollar public education campaigns that might bring that silent majority in. I’m not aware of anyone that has actually coordinated that. And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for supporters of Common Core.

The Hunt Institute hosted a regular conference call with CCSS proponents in an attempt to better coordinate the communications effort, but it had little ability (or desire) to push the unwieldy coalition to take specific actions. •• Tactics of supporters were simply less effective. During the latter part of 2013 and early 2014, there was a palpable sense that the tide was turning against the CCSS—the polls were showing rising opposition; news stories were reporting criticisms connected to the standards; talk radio hosts were regularly denouncing the Common Core; politicians such as Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal, once supporters of the Common Core as governors, were now voicing their opposition. As one interview respondent noted about the feeling at the time, Every day it seems like there’s sort of a drumbeat of bad news. The support is eroding and people are taking a step back and, the fear is that the populist outrage that was worked up by key Tea Party figures and leading figures, was starting to have an impact.

Synthesizing the views of those we interviewed, there seems to be two general critiques of the strategies employed by supporters that had contributed to the growing pushback against the standards. First, there was a sense that the electronic media strategies utilized were too passive and based on a mistaken belief that Common Core supporters felt that information campaigns would be enough to clarify the benefits of the standards. Second, there was a sentiment that the state education agencies were not effectively communicating to educators and the public about the merits of the standards. One notable thing about the digital media strategies employed by our sample of interest groups (see Table 3) is that they mostly utilized what are referred to as “push” strategies (Corniani, 2008). “Push” strategies leave content on a website or other central location, and invite people to access it. This often requires interested parties to initiate activity and may reduce use. When we asked our interview sample about their approaches to communicating their messages about the CCSS, we heard a lot about preparing and disseminating information. The following quotes illustrate this theme:


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We put together materials that are disseminated to our constituents and they are then encouraged to make that information available. (Advocacy group) We need to . . . make certain that we can deliver enough information about the Common Core so that our public will be prepared to deal with [the opposition]. (Policy group) Our job is to disseminate accurate and comprehensive information about what the Common Core is. (Policy group) We’ve developed our own set of materials that are really just sort of what it is and what it isn’t. We see our role as an attempt to help folks get the truth amidst all these crazy rumors. (Advocacy group)

We heard less about strategies to spark conversations through social media or other network-facilitating tools, unlike the more social media conversationstirring approaches utilized by the Common Core opponents (Supovitz, Daly, & Del Fresno, 2015). One of our advocacy group respondents noted the heavy emphasis on “educating” constituents on the facts and the efforts by his and other groups to clarify the myths and misinformation that were floating around in the public and policy conversations. He commented, “If all we do is educate and ignore the politics, the political games that are being played in the name of the Common Core, we will not win.” A second tactical mistake noted by several respondents in our sample was the reliance on state departments of education to play a key role in communicating the value of the CCSS to the public. They felt that the state agencies were inexperienced in this role and ill suited to organizing and enacting effective public communication campaigns. As one advocacy organization leader said, “SEAs [state education agencies] are used to giving money out and ensuring compliance. They are not effective communication organizations.” Several felt that this was exacerbated by the difficulty of identifying the targets for communication—teachers, district administrators, or the general public?

Contextual Factors The final theme we classified, contextual factors, was closely linked to the political climate at the time, which made it difficult for politicians to view the CCSS issue as separate from their party affiliation. Instead, one’s position on the standards became a litmus test for an ideological position. This was

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exacerbated by the large number of legislative and gubernatorial elections in 2014 (McGuinn, 2014) and the political posturing of aspiring Republican presidential candidates in early 2015. •• Political climate, particularly in conservative states, made support for the CCSS politically difficult. As the CCSS became increasingly politicized, it became more and more difficult for state politicians to judge the issue of education standards on their merit. Rather, a politician’s position on the CCSS became a litmus test for party loyalty. As one education advocacy group leader explained, The politics are just terrible, especially in these conservative states where Republicans don’t have any fear from Democrats but they do fear primaries or they do fear having their base not turn out to help them in the next election. And even though they may agree with the Common Core on the merits, when it comes to the politics . . . they are feeling a lot of pressure to give in to the Tea Party demand on this one.

The Obama administration’s vocal public support for the standards and its decision to encourage CCSS adoption through RTTT was viewed by many as being a significant contributor to the politicization of the issue. A representative of a policy member group felt that there was a fine line between federal support and overreach. He felt that the federal government offered states a “nudge” to adopt the standards (through RTTT), but that it was not a requirement or coercion. Others, however, felt that even though state policymakers were well educated on the CCSS issue, the political environment required a real balancing act: I’ve got to say leadership in almost all of the states have read enough, they’ve been to enough training . . . I think they are really knowledgeable and they get it. And I think that most of them, and again these are Rs [Republicans] and Ds [Democrats] and even conservatives Rs who, who have been through those discussions and are knowledgeable, basically support it [the Common Core] . . . But it’s a real political balancing act for a lot of these people, primarily Republicans, because so much of the opposition is coming from their conservative wing, not to suggest there isn’t opposition on the Democratic side for sure, but these are the folks, I think, who are really put in this tough position. Intuitively and intellectually they get what we’re trying to do with the standards, but they just have to move people along. They have to, you know, work through the legislative and political and public process. And so they’re navigating these really tough waters.


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This quote points to the increasing difficulty that politicians had in judging the issue of standards in isolation, as it became entangled with a variety of other hot-button issues.

Study Limitations There are several limitations to our study, which may have a bearing on our conclusions. First, the sample we chose was idiosyncratic, although we believe it reflected a reasonable set of the most influential advocacy organizations. By selecting a different basket of interest groups, we might have arrived at different conclusions. Second, our sample is not counterbalanced with a set of Common Core opposition groups that could explain their strategies and interpretations of the climate at the time of the study. Third, as we have no direct information about the extent to which policymakers used the information provided to them by advocacy groups, we can only infer that this information played a role in helping supporters retain the CCSS in states which threatened to repeal it. However, this assumption may not hold up to more detailed scrutiny and further data collection.

Discussion In 2013-2014, at the time of our study, the CCSS movement was seemingly at its tipping point. From initial widespread support for the CCSS in 2010, events and circumstances led to their becoming one of the most contentious education policy initiatives in recent memory. Both opinion polling data and state legislative challenges testified to the climate of a reform at risk. The CCSS seemed on the cusp of widespread rejection, both by the public and in state legislatures. In this article, we have used interviews with a range of education advocacy group leaders to understand the climate within which this shift was occurring and to understand their efforts to influence the environment. In our conceptual framework, we depicted the policy process as a sequence of policymaking activities that are buffeted by an array of actors and forces that influence this process both directly and indirectly. These activities occur during a particular period in time among a particular set of actors and circumstances, but they are also nested in a broader temporal dynamic. Much like the frames in an ongoing film, current events not only foreground the dynamics that dominate particular circumstances of the moment, but they are also connected to what has come before them and will, in turn, influence what comes after. Interpreting the advocacy group efforts from this vantage point illuminates a number of things.

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First, by nesting the CCSS reform era within larger historical and political forces, we gain the advantage of looking at activities and events from a macroperspective. From a broader viewpoint, the CCSS reform was the latest in the long line of clashes between forces for coherence in educational policy and our long-standing distrust of central authority that goes back to the nation’s founding as a revolution against a monarchy (Mehta, 2013). Efforts to create central standards and expectations, which afford the advantages of coherence, efficiency, and scale, directly confront the skepticism of largescale governmental efforts and top-down bureaucracy. Many have argued that the CCSS cleverly tried to skirt this deep-rooted dilemma by positioning itself as a state-led effort (McDermott, 2012; McDonnell & Weatherford, 2013). But this was compromised by federal incentives for standards adoption under RTTT and the funding of the CCSS-aligned test consortia. A second temporal factor that had an influence on the dynamics surrounding the CCSS movement was the shadows extending from the previous highstakes testing era of the NCLB legislation of 2001. Even though the CCSS were a renewed effort at creating standards, albeit with associated and aligned assessments, a lot of backlash against the CCSS came from those who felt that high-stakes testing was too dominant in the education system and who viewed the CCSS era as a further extension of testing and accountability. Third, at the time the data were collected for this article the standards were in a peculiar position of simultaneously being adopted and implemented. While CCSS had been conceived, developed, and adopted by 45 states, and were in the midst of the implementation process in states and localities across the nation, many states were simultaneously revisiting whether to continue to use the standards and in what form. Most of the governors who had supported the CCSS in 2010 were no longer in office in 2013, and the standards were besieged in a number of mostly Republican-controlled states. Recognizing that the CCSS were at different stages of the policymaking process in different locales also helped us understand the diverse and seemingly chaotic activities of the different interest groups that sought to influence this process. As interest groups tried to respond to different contextual situations across the country, their messages, activities, and target audiences may have appeared from the outside to be disorganized, when they were in fact trying to be responsive to a range of different situations. At the state level, they were responding to the turning tide of public opinion, as well as legislative and funding challenges, while at the local level they were trying to support district implementation efforts. Thus, CCSS interest groups were really confronting two distinct battles in 2013-2014. The first was a public communications fight to sway public opinion. The second was a more insider fight lobbying for political support within


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state legislatures. The evidence from public opinion polls suggests that the fight for public opinion did not go well. Our respondents pointed to an array of reasons, including a lack of concerted messaging strategies among the different advocacy groups, a failure to take the initiative and control the message in the early quieter days, and the misuse of state education departments as instruments of communication. In addition, advocates found themselves behind the curve with their electronic media strategies. While CCSS advocates described using Web 2.0-based strategies, theirs were largely of the more traditional kinds using outdated “push” strategies (Corniani, 2008), such as web-based press kits and talking points, PowerPoint presentations, and videos. By contrast, opponents of the CCSS were more effective at employing social media strategies, rousing public activists to use contemporary technologies such as Twitter, You Tube, and Facebook to spread messages of CCSS opposition (Supovitz, Daly, & Del Fresno, 2015). Despite their relatively ineffective communications attempts, the political lobbying efforts of the advocacy groups appeared, in retrospect, to have had more success. While there were legislative efforts to overturn the standards in 11 states in 2013, only Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina actually did so, and the changes were mostly symbolic, as the standards that replaced them were largely a repackaged version of the CCSS (McGuinn & Supovitz, 2016). Thus, the advocacy group efforts, including testifying at legislative hearings, providing briefings and talking points to CCSS legislative supports, and direct lobbying, appear to have contributed to the persistence of the Common Core. As of the summer of 2016, the vast majority of the states that originally adopted the Common Core remained committed to them. The longer a state implements the Common Core, the less likely it will be to drop them. State governments, school administrators, and teachers have already invested a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money in implementing the standards and realigning their education systems around the new standards and assessments. These represent “sunk costs” that cannot be recouped if a state changes direction, and the replacement of the CCSS with something truly new would require significant new investment. As a result, states are likely to become increasingly “path dependent” with regard to the CCSS as time goes on. While the Common Core “brand” has been damaged, surveys show that public support for the idea of ambitious national standards remains strong among teachers and the general public. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes 1. Alaska, Texas, Virginia, and Nebraska did not adopt the Common Core, preferring their own state standards. Minnesota adopted the Common Core standards for English language arts (ELA) but not mathematics. 2. Alaska, North Dakota, Texas, and Vermont did not submit Race to the Top (RTTT) applications.

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Author Biographies Jonathan Supovitz is a Professor of Education Policy and Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and the Co-Director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). Dr. Supovitz has published findings from numerous educational studies and evaluations of state and district reform efforts and is the co-editor of Challenging Standards (2015) and The Implementation Gap (2008) and author of The Case for District-Based Reform (2006). His areas of specialty include education policy, school leadership, professional development, data use, classroom formative assessment, and state and district standards and accountability systems. He is the Executive Director of the CPRE Knowledge Hub (cprehub.org), a virtual space that brings together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners learn and collaborate on challenges in the education field. Patrick J. McGuinn is a Professor of Political Science and Education at Drew University and a Senior Research Specialist at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). He is the author or editor of three books on education: No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005 (2006), Education Governance for the 21st Century: Overcoming the Structural Barriers to School Reform (2013) and The Convergence of K-12 and Higher Education: Policies and Programs in a Changing Era (2016). Dr. McGuinn is a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and has produced a number of policy reports for the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for American Progress, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and the New America Foundation.