A Letter to the Editor: Chamber of Commerce Breakfast

Presented at Ocean City Chamber of Commerce breakfast meeting where Worcester County School Superintendent, Dr. Jerry Wilson address members. 4/10/14

1) A recent study published by the Brookings Institution has concluded that the Common Core State Standards will have little to no impact on student achievement.

In fact, the report states, It will take 24 years for a noticeable improvement to unfold and that improvement would add up to just a 7.62 point increase on the National Assessment of Educational Progress scale.

2) Last month - Mike Cohen, President of Achieve which was was one of the original organizations that wrote the Common Core standards stated, "We don't have any kind of good metrics for measuring common-core implementation's success.”

Keep in mind that they have been working on this since 2009.

3) In Sept. Bill Gates who some say has spent over $2 billion on the promotion and implementation of Common Core said - “It would be great if our education stuff worked, but we won’t know for probably a decade”.

4) In December a report from MD State Dept. of Education stated that a large amount of schools in MD are not technologically prepared to give new online Common Core tests and that at least $100 million will have to be spent by 2015 to get ready. That’s not including the $100’s of million already spent. The report goes on to say, that the number of students being required to be tested will increase from 300,000 to 1.1 million. Costs of test will be between $34 - $68 million/yr.

Testing times will increase by an average of over 85%

For examples - 4th grader test times are going from 5 hr. to 9 hr.

Testing window will go from 2 weeks to 4 weeks.

Dr Wilson, given that there appears to be little or no evidence that common core will improve education, given the toll on students, parents and teachers due to the testing requirements and given the huge cost to taxpayers who never agreed to adopting this program. Why should we continue with the implementation of Common Core?

Dr. Wilson did not answer the question.

Fran Gebhart
Berlin, MD