Uncommon Kids Need More than the Core
Principal Carol Burris is a local hero, frequently writing in Valerie Strauss blog. Most recently, she wrote about the incipient disaster that is the Common Core. They're raising the bar, making everything rigorous, and making sure my ESL students don't get out of high school until they're senior citizens. This is because what the world needs now is rigor, sweet rigor, according to great minds like David Coleman and Reformy John King.If these scores were used last year, the New York four-year graduation rate would have dropped from 74 percent to 34 percent. But even that awful rate would not be evenly spread across student groups. A close look demonstrates just how devastating the imposition of the Common Core scores would be for our minority, disadvantaged and ELL students, as well as our students with disabilities.
Because widespread failure is good for everyone. I mean, sure, kids don't like it, and parents don't like it, and teachers don't like it, but we can't focus on special interests. The important thing is to produce the tests, material to support the tests, and privatized empires like that of Eva Moskowitz so that folks of her ilk can continue to bring home the big bucks.
My attention was caught by another point. Over and over, we hear that we need to make kids "college ready," and evidently those of us educated before the magical Common Core are all a bunch of knuckle-draggers, unable to carry on a discussion about anything whatsoever. And yet, despite all the talk of tests, here's something we already knew:
A study by the National Association of College Admission Counseling (NACAC) looked at the college performance of eight cohorts of