OBAMACORE PART III

Today we are posting:

"OBAMACORE"

Part III
Author:   Gamaliel Isaac

Could the Goals of Leveling the Playing Field be Hurting American Competitiveness?

            

         Dr. Milgram’s statement regarding how State Department of Educations lowered the standards of Common Core may be surprising, after all one would think that the goal of Department of Educations is to see to it that students are well educated.  The degree that other goals can take priority is illustrated by the story of the Shuang Wen School and the New York Department of Education.

Shuang Wen is located in district 1, a district with many progressive schools with lower standards.  I have included a table of ratings by insideschools.org of the performance of school in the same district as Shuang Wen in 2011 to show just how much Shuang Wen outperformed its peer schools.

School	Math	English
Anna Silver	53.2	31
Children’s workshop	56.7	50
Earth school	67.8	69.5
Neighborhood school	68.9	68.3
East Village	76.2	77.8
Shuang Wen	98.4	89.2

            

           Shuang Wen was a shining light in a mediocre school district.  One would think that the city would have done everything it could to support that school.  Instead the principal of that school was investigated more than a dozen times. 

I think that the high proportion of Chinese students in the Shuang Wen School and their vastly superior performance compared to schools with other minority populations sent a message the DOE did not want heard.  It made the DOE look bad for the poor performance of other schools.  It also sent a message that Chinese outperform other minorities and that didn't fit the ideologies of DOE bureaucrats.  Since the DOE could not raise the performance of the other schools they leveled the playing field by bringing down the Shuang Wen School.  Rather than admit that Chinese students as a whole were more hard working and respectful of their teachers and more devoted to education than large percentages of other minority groups, the DOE blamed Shuang Wen’s principal for the inferior performance of the other schools of District 1.  They looked for reasons to get rid of her and found ridiculous excuses such as her reporting students attending school when they left early in the day to celebrate the Chinese New Year. 

On July 1, 2011 DOE marched into the school with the police.  Trinh Eng, one of the parents at the school told a reporter what happened next.

"One girl, entering her 8th grade year at Shuang Wen, was completely devastated. Teachers held each other and cried," she said. "[When] Principal Ling Ling Chou came out of the building, a thundering, spontaneous round of applause erupted amidst of shouts of  “Thank you.”

The DOE’s hostility to Ling Ling Chou was so great that after parents put up a memorial poster in her honor on a wall in the school the DOE ordered it taken down.

The principal the DOE hated so much had an extraordinary work ethic and devotion to her school.  She knew every student by name and came in on Saturdays to tutor children who needed help.  Students and teachers knew she cared about them and that motivated them.

Two years later Shuang Wen is still a good school but it is not the great school it was when Ling Ling Chou was the principal. 

Perhaps Common Core could have been a great curriculum but because of the influence of DOEs and other groups whose primary goals are not the education of our children it is a very bad curriculum.

Please carefully note the Shuang Wen test score results compared to other schools.  The other school's scores do not come close to those of Shuang Wen.

Note that the English score at Shuang Wen is almost three times higher than those at Anna Silver.   For this success Shuang is punished.   This evidence proves to any sound minded person that the Department of Education does not want the schools to succeed academically.   

The purpose of Common Core is to bring everyone down to the lowest level.   Remember, everyone is supposed to "feel good" about themselves.   Of course, when you bore the more intelligent students with an unchallenging curriculum, they won't bother to try and succeed at a higher level.   In fact the higher level is purposely discouraged.