Both No Child Left Behind and CCSS are based on a pseudo science theory many of us call The Lake Wobegon Effect. The Lake Wobegon effect is based on a mythical town in Minnesota called Lake Wobegon. This town was created by Garrison Keillor, for his PBS radio show called A Prairie Home Companion.
In his introduction to his
stories about Lake Wobegon each week, Kiellor starts off by describing
Lake Wobegon as the town where “All the women are strong, all the
men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” …...
It's a joke! All three of those characterizations are impossible because
they defy the laws of mathematical statistical distribution.
The same principle applies to
the No Child Left Behind requirement that all children must be
proficient in ELA and math by 2014. That's because as Diane Ravitch,
an expert in standards (she served on the Board of the NAEP) explains
in her new book “proficient” is generally considered by experts
to be achievement well above average on nationally normed
standardized tests. You cannot order all children to be above
average just by passing a law or by setting standards! But our
government believes (and of course Louisiana Believes) that you can
order teachers to somehow teach all students to achieve at an above
average level.
Never mind that some students were what we once knew as “crack babies”,
or suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, or (as one of my
grandchildren) are autistic. Or how about the thousands of kids that
don't have a single book in their home, or a quiet place to do their
homework, or even one parent who cares at all about whether or not
they do well in school?
If
it were true that we can get children to learn at a certain level
just by setting standards, we could order all children to learn
calculus, or physics, or even quantum mechanics just by having the BESE
set such a standard. I know from my experience as a science teacher that less
than 1% of the American public can ever learn quantum mechanics even
if they were to really, really apply themselves to that goal.
But
what about the Common Core? (Please read this excellent speech on Common Core by Diane Ravitch) Were not the CCSS set by a panel of
experts in K-12 education who had a strong basic knowledge of
learning theory as well as solid classroom teaching experience?
Absolutely not! There were no practicing classroom teachers, and no
early childhood education experts on the CCSS writing committee. The
Chairman of the CCSS project was David Coleman, a person with even
fewer K-12 education credentials than our own Louisiana amateur state
superintendent. Coleman was turned down for a job as a high school
teacher in New York because he was not certified to be a teacher. No
one knows whether or not the CCSS are practical and achievable
because they were never tested in any way before being mandated in
the majority of our states.
The
early results of CCSS as measured by one of the new common core tests
were disastrous! The first results of testing in New York state, a
state that always performs better than Louisiana on the NAEP test,
classified 70% of New York students as failures! Have the Common Core standards been modified as a result of the New York testing? Absolutely not! As Diane Ravitch explains, there is no provision for modifying the CCSS when problems are found. But to make things
worse, there is no evidence whatsoever that putting students through
a CCSS compliant curriculum will prepare them for college or to
compete favorably with students from other nations. Our students are being used as guinea pigs for this experiment.
There
is only one sure thing that we can all depend upon in the
implementation of the Common Core State Standards. That
is: teachers will most definitely be blamed if our students don't
do as well as expected by our non educator bosses who have set the bar for the CCSS!
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