Louisiana Educator: White Gets an Earful

Louisiana Educator: White Gets an Earful:

White Gets an Earful

I attended a 4 hour hearing on the Common Core State Standards Monday at the Capitol. (See also the Advocate article on this) For this hearing, members of the public and teachers were not allowed to testify, but I believe that most of the many legislators in attendance who had actually been hearing complaints from parents and teachers did a pretty good job of relaying the tremendous frustration about the implementation of CCSS to Chas Roemer (BESE President) and John White.

Representative Cameron Henry who has already announced that he will propose legislation to eliminate Common Core in Louisiana led off with a barrage of questions where he demanded to see the evidence used by BESE in making the decision to adopt the Common Core. When asked to present any data or studies that showed how Common Core would be good for our students, Roemer was caught off guard and could only say that tougher standards were good for students. (That's been the selling point: increased rigor will make our students better) White told the legislators that the Common Core standards were written by experts who studied the standards that have been used by other leading countries for years that helped their students perform much better than ours. (Diane Ravitch in her new book seriously disputes this conclusion with real statistics) No one could say