Common Core does not help

Standards do not make students smarter. If they did, then the Grade-Level Expectations from No Child Left Behind would have accomplished this. Any unencumbered educator will tell you that NCLB was doomed to failure. The Houston School District model that President Bush used to get elected as the "Education President" was based on faulty data. Even though federal and state departments of education pretend it does not exist, there is a bell curve. NCLB standards contradict the bell curve. All students cannot and will never be 100 percent at grade level.

The Common Core State Standards are no different from the first set of GLEs educators used at the start of NCLB. There is nothing about CCSS that makes students any more "college and career ready" than any other standards used in the past.

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has misled Missouri educators and the public about CCSS. They want us to believe the standards are harmless and students need them to make them competitive globally. This is not true. DESE says the standards are internationally benchmarked but recently had to recant because it was untrue.

There is no research to back up DESE's claims. Please read a true scholarly researched paper using peer reviewed evidence: "Common Core State Standards: An Example of Data-less Decision Making" by Christopher H. Tienken found here:

http://www.aasa.org/uploadedfiles/publications/newsletters/jsp_winter2011.final.pdf

Do your homework, find your voice, and support others to halt the loss of local control of education.

JANET CRIDDLE, Cape Girardeau