Louisiana Can't Do a Better Job !

In an interview last Friday, Governor Jindal repeated the 'status quo' line that we should abandon the Common Core Standards because the state can do a better job of developing its own academic standards.

To all those who continue to support this argument, I have one question, “Where have you been living for the last 25 years?” It certainly must not have been in Louisiana.  Does the acronym LEAP (Louisiana Educational Assessment Program) sound familiar?  That was a state-developed paradigm of standards, and assessments exactly like what Jindal and others are now advocating for as the alternative to the Common Core Standards.

LEAP came to life in 1989 legislation touting all the same themes the present Core bashers seem to believe, namely, that Louisiana, knows best how to educate its youth, and has the skills to do just that.  LEAP turned out to be a perfect example of an educational house of horrors.

I can only assume that Jindal, like some of the other Core critiques, had his children in private school, and therefore probably has little or no conception of the failings of the state-designed LEAP.

After millions of tax payers’ monies spent, 20 or more years of holding thousands of students back at the fourth grade and eighth grade, and denying thousands more graduation from high school until they mastered the LEAP standards, Louisiana’s 4^th and 8th graders are still either 48^th or LAST in their reading and math skills on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing of the 50 states.

This empirical data clearly indicates that Louisiana doesn’t have the educational leadership to do what Jindal advocates and he best decide to stick with the Common Core Standards to serve as guides for local school districts in developing curriculums.

Additionally, Jindal, like so many others ranting about the Common Core Standards, doesn’t understand the difference between a curriculum and a standard.  The standards are NOT a curriculum.  Louisiana educators are totally responsible for deciding how the standards are taught.  If parents are don’t like the methods utilized to teach the students, and find them confusing, that is the fault of the ‘experts’ in Louisiana, not the standards themselves.

Please, if you are opposed to the Common Core Standards, don’t continue to use the argument that Louisiana can do a better job by designing their own standards and assessments, for there is LITTLE to NO evidence to support that claim.