Last year William Schmidt and Richard Houang published a paper in the Educational Researcher that claimed to have explored the coherence of the Common Core state standards in mathematics (CCSSM) and their similarity to those of other high achieving nations. The study (Schmidt & Houang, “Curricular Coherence and the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics,” 41(8), 2012) has received significant attention, and defenders of the Common Core started to use it in support of their claims of CCSSM’s high quality. Schmidt himself testified before the Michigan House Education Committee last March and made the following claims.

• Common Core’s standards are very consistent with the standards in the world’s top-achieving countries;
• States with standards like the Common Core are the ones that did the best on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP);
• The Common Core is “coherent” and “hierarchical,” unlike many of the state standards it replaced.

The 2012 study Schmidt and Houang published does not support Schmidt’s claims. In their study Schmidt and Houang analyzed the CCSSM and coded them “applying the same methodology” used in their study of the A+ (high-achieving) countries that participated in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 1995. However, the graduate students who did the actual coding in 2012 were clearly incompetent to perform this task.