Common Core dumbs down education.  That is its principle.  If education is dumb, then inner city inhabitants can “get it”…

Where as before we tried educating our smartest, challenging them to heights unknown, and giving them room to grow to achieve them,  that created a gap.  One called the “Achievement Gap.”   Letting smart people run with the ball, put them very far out there and there was no way inner city children of underemployed parents could keep up… The smarter the top got, but bigger the gap.

So the idea came about to dumb down education.   If the smart got dumber, and the dumb got smarter, there would be no gap, see?  We could have done this along time ago if we had just made our graduation requirements the saying of the ABC’s and counting to a hundred….

So we repeat things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and the dumb get smarter.

But this doesn’t work mathematically for a system as a whole. .  Hence scores WILL go down.

Let us take a class and we will rank them from 1 to 5 on their abilities.

Let us make it eleven people…   Before common core.

1+1+2+2+3+3+3+3+4+4+5 /11 =  31 / 11 or… 2.82

Lets us assume the dumbing down of standards allows Common Core to raise all scores under 3 by one point,  and 3 then becomes  the top score since no instruction higher than a 3 is being taught…

In the same class….

2+2+3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3/11 =   31/11 or again… 2.82….

So our plan to dumb down education with Common Core is helping the bottom layer at the expense of the top layer.   If one knows numbers one can see I was very generous towards Common Core by giving it the best possible scenario compared to the worst of before.  Even at its best, Common Core can barely pull even with a non common core curriculum…

If your goal is to lower knowledge so low that “even a cave man can get it”, you have succeeded.  But if your goal was to make the US more competitive on the global market…  look above, and ask yourself if you would you hire a 3 from the US, or a 4 or 5 from somewhere else?

Of course, this mathematical model offers interesting solutions.   For example,  what if you made a two tier system and used  the Common Core curriculum for those who were 1’s and 2’s, and used a normal curriculum for everyone else 3 and above?   Perhaps a curriculum  like those determined by local school boards for instance?

Assuming this, … (we raised the ones and twos by one value and kept the 3’s, 4’s,and 5’s as in the original)

2+2+3+3+3+3+3+3+4+4+5 /11 = 35/11  or  3.181

If we have a two tier educational system, we achieve a net increase.   You cannot raise national scores by lowering the high scores in order to bring up the lowest.   You must raise the lowest and also raise the highest..

Common Core only works on the lowest.  It should be designated solely to those considered underachievers.

This should be no surprise except to Arne Duncun, the Department of Education, Bill Gates, and Ed Broad…  Since the beginning of man, teachers who teach to the individual level of each student,  tend to have the most successful results.   That can indeed happen if we make it a national standard to have an 11 to 1 teacher/student ratio.

Only then will we see improvement.  As for now, all bets are on the test scores dropping as Common Core moves further and further into the local schools  curriculum.