Back in the early days when I’d first state from personal experience that Common Core was a bad operation, I’d get hit with people who’d research their website and say: “you’re wrong. look at these nice ideals..” It made me check myself, and research why the out product was not like the in product… There has to be something afoul.

If someone took my recommendations of how to fix NCLB education from 7 years ago, their results would show similarities to Common Core. I’m afraid those at the top, only see their glowing goals, and don’t accept reality on the ground. Keep in mind, if one always has ones eyes on the sun, they can easily walk off the top of a building.

So to explain to some of these people whose heads are in the cloud, exactly where this went wrong, I’ve come up with this scenario…

It’s the 1960-s. De-segregation is the trend. It is the moral, lofty, thing to do. It gets approved at the top, and then those orders start coming down. The Governor appoints people who in turn appoint local people at each county level to implement the process of de-segregation. The appointees elect fine outstanding citizens, businessmen and politicians, to lead the effort… Unbeknown to those doing the appointing, many of those fine outstanding businessmen, are dragons in the KKK… You just gave them the order to desegregate the county. And the rate of lynchings go up. “We don’t have segregation here; we now only have white people.” That is exactly what happened inside Common Core when you gave all inclusive power of implementation, to the very entities that were destroying education: educational corporations….

Teaching is an art, not a science. Though one can use scientific tools to analyze art, such as to quantize Leonardo’s Mona Lisa… by just reading data of how many pixels of green, blue, red, etc were spread around, it does not enable you to reproduce it exactly. You have to see art, to appreciate it. Similarly, data dumping does not denote good teaching. It can help you with background knowledge, but it still takes intangibles to create art, and teaching, is an art….

Corporations are blind to intangibles. They work under the assumption that a golf hole-in-one is doable every time. The only reason it doesn’t happen, they say, is because the science behind the swing was not perfect. Something was wrong with the aim, the angle, the iron, the green, the wind, those trees bordering the other fairway… but one should be able to drive a hole-in-one every single time if they used rigor until they were perfect…

Teaching is not like that. Hole-in-ones are rare. But low golf scores can be acquired through experience. Simple exposure to many wide ranging factors, hones our abilities more than a course structured on hitting a hole in one on one hole of one golf course in one state, in one nation, on one planet…

The wrong people are in charge of Common Core, which is why it failed… Putting teachers in control of growing Common Core, will be putting the “best” in charge of a plan that on its surface, has good merit. I should know. I pushed it to the right people in the middle of NCLB.

If putting a black minister in charge of de-segregation was a good idea. Putting teachers in charge of moving Common Core forward, would be an equally great idea…