It's time to Revise Louisiana's

School Curriculum 

Present standards do not allow for individual differences and life goals

For the last 15 years Louisiana's LEAP tests have been based primarily on standards promoted nationwide during the Obama administration called the Common Core State Standards. The National governor's organization and the Council of Chief State School Officers in the early part of the new century initiated a project, partially at the urging of business groups to propose nationwide standards that could utilized by all states to improve their K-12 education standards. The job of actually designing the standards was given to the private organization, the College Board. The working group that designed the standards now known as the CCSS was composed mostly of testing experts related to the College Board. The College Board designs and markets the Scholastic Aptitude Testing (SAT) and other tests that can be served to get college credits. The SAT scores,  have long been used by colleges as a means of determining students who are most prepared to succeed in the U. S. higher education system. The Common Core project was rapidly taken over by David Coleman, the president of the College Board and some of his colleagues.  

The idea that all public school students should be prepared for college was a concept sold to influential business groups including philanthropist Bill Gates and then to president Barrac Obama. The project was fully embraced by Arne Duncan, the then Secretary of Education for the Obama administration. The U. S. Department of Education is not allowed to mandate the curriculum of public schools. This authority is legally reserved to each individual state. Nevertheless, the Education Secretary, Duncan decided to use the influence of the Gates Foundation and business groups to convince all states to adopt the new standards. They succeeded in convincing the majority of states to adopt their standards that they carefully labeled the Common Core State standards. Professional educators in the states were mostly ignored in the process of selling this scheme to state education boards and to many legislators. No studies were done to see if a college prep curriculum was appropriate for all students. The only real opposition to the new standards arose from mostly conservative Tea Party groups who thought that the new standards were being pushed by big government, in an effort to introduce godless concepts such as evolution in the training of all school children. Even so, by August 2010 41 states had made a commitment to adopt the Common Core as their basic curriculum.

At the beginning of the implementation of the new standards, there was a major outcry by conservative parents and legislators who objected to adopting standards mandated by the federal government. The Louisiana legislature responded by demanded that the standards be changed or replaced by Louisiana standards. A committee was formed to revise the standards. Unfortunately the revision committee was required by the State Superintendent to use the CCSS standards as the basic working document. This assured that the Federal model would be primarily followed. Louisiana made some small changes in these nationally promoted standards and rebranded them as the Louisiana State Standards.

For 15 years now the state LEAP tests have been based on these revised standards. After all this time, the results are far from impressive. If we examine the secret raw scores for Louisiana students who take these tests, we find that about half of our students score only slightly above what would be achieved by making random choices on the multiple choice questions on the tests. But this dismal performance is hidden by converting the raw test scores to so called scale scores which give the false impression that students are actually demonstrating significant learning. But the raw scores continue to demonstrate that about half of our students are learning almost nothing in the basic subjects of reading, math, science and social studies. In Louisiana 70% of our students are economically disadvantaged. According to the raw scores on the state tests, these students are learning close to nothing in their required academic subjects including reading, math, science and social studies. These disastrous results have not improved significantly in the 15 years that the new standards have been in effect.

To make matters worse, changes in BESE promotion policies have allowed 98% of our students to be promoted to the next grade even if they fail to achieve even the extremely low standards for satisfactory performance.  The promoters of these new standards, led by State Superintendent John White had predicted that after a few years of schooling based on the new standards, student scores would go up and the learning gap between economically advantaged and economically disadvantaged would shrink significantly. White had claimed that the problem with our schools was that teachers did not have high expectations for their students. The state would correct this perceived flaw by adopting higher standards which would be enforced using the new, more rigorous LEAP tests. Now that the system has been in effect for twelve years, we should see significantly improved results. The latest test results demonstrate that no significant improvement has occurred. The problem was never about teachers having low expectations. Louisiana needed to have a more relevant curriculum that would be motivating for students and that would prepare them for great careers. It is time that we change the curriculum to give all students a chance to succeed.