CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2022

Between the State and the Schoolhouse examines the Common Core State Standards from the initiative's promising beginnings to its disappointing outcomes. Situating the standards in the long history of state and federal efforts to shape education, the book describes a series of critical lessons that highlight the political and structural challenges of large-scale, top-down reforms.

Education policy expert Tom Loveless argues that there are too many layers between the state and the classroom for a national standards approach to be effective. Specifically, he emphasizes the significant gap between states' roles in designing education policy and teachers' roles as implementers of policy. In addition, he asserts that top-down policies are unpredictable, subject to political and ideological pressures, and vulnerable to the pendulum effect as new reforms emerge in response to previous ones.

One of the most ambitious education reforms of the past century, the Common Core aimed to raise student success, prepare larger numbers of students for both college and careers, and close achievement gaps. Yet, as Loveless documents, a decade later there remains a lack of significant positive impact on student learning.

Between the State and the Schoolhouse marks an important contribution to the debate over the standards movement and the role of federal and state governments in education reform.
About the Author: Tom Loveless is an education researcher and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (1999-2014). From 2000 to 2017, he authored The Brown Center Report on American Education, an annual report analyzing important trends in education. Loveless has published widely in scholarly journals and appeared in popular media to discuss school reform, student achievement, and other education topics.

Loveless holds a PhD in education from the University of Chicago, an MA in special education from California State University, Sacramento, and an AB in English from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1979 to 1988, Loveless was a classroom teacher in the San Juan Unified School District, near his hometown of Sacramento, California. From 1992 to 1999, Loveless was an assistant and associate professor of public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. At Brookings, Loveless served as director of the Brown Center on Education Policy from 1999 to 2008.

From 2004 to 2012, Loveless represented the United States at the General Assembly of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Assessment, a sixty-nation organization that governs international testing. From 2006 to 2008, he was a member of the president's National Mathematics Advisory Panel.