Civil rights lawyer Wendy Lecker writes that Arne Duncan has sold the American public a bill of goods, a false narrative. He and David Colemn think that national standards will fix all the problems of American education. She says they are wrong. Their bad ideas are the problem. They are wrong.

She writes:

“Before the Common Core, according to Duncan, high school success was a “lie” — it certainly did not mean that students were “college ready.”

“What a compelling, but false, narrative. A new peer-reviewed longitudinal nationwide study confirmed that the most reliable predictor of cumulative college GPA and college graduation is a student’s high school GPA.

“The study, co-authored by former Bates College Dean of Admissions William Hiss, examined more than 123,000 student records at public and private universities across the country, universities serving predominately minority students and art schools. It compared those who submitted SAT or ACT scores for admission to those who did not.

“The authors found students with strong high school records succeeded in college, despite lower standardized test scores. Strong testers with lower GPAs had lower college performance. Non-submitters tended to be women, first-generation college students, PELL grant recipients, students of color and students with learning disabilities. The authors found a broad geographic appeal to non-submissions.

“All of the students in this study attended school prior to the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. Many began school well before the No Child Left Behind Act. They graduated from a variety of schools across the country, learned different curricula in states with different standards. Their GPAs did not depend on standardized tests. Yet consistently, their high school GPAs were reliable predictors of college success. If these students succeeded in American high schools, no matter what the curricula, standards or assessments, they succeeded in American colleges, public or private, large or small.

“This fact undermines the claims that American students need national standards, standardized curricula and nationally standardized tests in order to be “college and career ready.” The high school teachers of students in this study accurately assessed their achievement, and taught them what they needed to know to do well in college — without common standards, scripted lessons or a nationalized test. In fact, the data show that the two national standardized tests, the SAT and ACT, were poor predictors of college success.”

Turns out that teachers’ grades are better predictors of college success than the SAT, the ACT, or other standardized tests.