ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan is leading a team of colleges that will receive funding to analyze the Common Core State Standards initiative that overhauls academic achievement standards for K-12 students nationwide.

The Spencer Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation awarded $5 million to a group of researchers from U-M, Brown University and Stanford University for the first phase of a five-year analysis of Common Core.

The project will look at how governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders are responding to the Common Core and how this is affecting classroom instruction and social disparities in academic achievement in school systems across the country.

Based at U-M’s Institute for Social Research, the project is led by principal investigator Brian Rowan, research professor at the institute and the Burke A. Hinsdale Collegiate Professor at U-M’s School of Education. Co-principal investigators include David Cohen, public policy professor and the John Dewey Collegiate Professor at the U-M School of Education; Susan Moffitt, associate professor of political science and international and public affairs at Brown; and Sean Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford.

“The Common Core is a watershed in American education—the first time the vast majority of states have committed to common standards for all children,” Rowan said. “Our research will look at a wide range of data to determine whether the effort to organize instruction around common standards is, in fact, improving academic performance for all students.”

Among the data that will be used in the study is a collection of video records of classroom teaching, available at U-M, from roughly 240 teachers in six urban school districts that participated in the Measures of Effective Teaching project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The study also will draw on a database archived at Stanford that allows researchers to track student achievement trends in all 50 states longitudinally.

The Spencer Foundation is contributing the bulk of the funding for the research—nearly $4.4 million—with the remainder coming from the William T. Grant Foundation.

“We are pleased to be funding this set of interwoven research studies to help understand the implementation of this controversial endeavor,” said Michael McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation. “Although the ultimate outcome will not be clear for years to come, we are convinced that these studies of the evolution of this effort, in the context of an extraordinarily complex and decentralized educational system, will prove highly instructive.”

“Educational inequality is one of our nation’s greatest challenges, and some view the adoption of common standards as an important step towards fostering greater equity,” said Adam Gamoran, president of the William T. Grant Foundation. “This study will help us understand how trends in achievement levels and achievement gaps may be related to patterns of adoption and implementation of Common Core. In doing so, it will also help us to understand the limits and possibilities of large-scale standards-based reform to achieve greater equity in educational outcomes.”

The project is called “Under Construction: The Rise, Spread, and Consequences of the Common Core State Standards Initiative in the U.S. Educational Sector.” The foundations have not yet committed to funding the second phase of the study, and will base further funding on the progress that is made in the first phase.