Joan Gorner (“Common Core is just the latest fad,” page A4, April 10 Herald) is rightly suspicious of Common Core as a cure-all education reform.

Common Core, like the No Child Left Behind law, is hatched by politicians in Washington, D.C., who are frustrated with the problems in education they do not understand.

Gorner writes that “every few years, someone dreams up a panacea to address education in the U.S.” This someone is mostly a superintendent who moves from school to school like an indulgence peddler to sell education salvation.

I remember vividly when a new superintendent convinced the North Kitsap School Board to divide NKHS into five autonomous Small Learning Communities. That was the future of education then. Three years earlier, in 1997, we switched from a six-period day to a four-period block because that, too, was the future of education.

A new principal pushed for the Digital Learning Commons, a computer-based “distant learning” procedure. Gov. Gary Locke came to launch the project in 2004 and told the staff that we are “helping to blaze the trail for the entire State of Washington. You are true pioneers.” While we were digital pioneers, we also embraced mainstreaming the non-plus ultra future of education in 2005.

And, another new principal introduced Differentiated Instruction in 2007 — another future, brain-dead on arrival. All of these expensive and time-consuming “reforms” were abandoned again.

Will Common Core produce better-educated kids? Of course not. As long as we try to squeeze all students through the same-size square hole and force them to take the one-size-fits-all high-stakes tests, or the punitive tests prescribed by teacher-hostile Olympia politicians, education won’t improve.

James Behrend
Bainbridge Island