Learning Results not well-thought out

Kennebec Journal, May 5, 2008

(excerpt) Your contributor (Alan Haley, column March 14) rightly called the Maine Learning Results a disaster, but he ignored the heart of the matter: Maine's presumption that all high school students can and should achieve the same set of high standards.

"One set of high standards for all" is not a meaningful concept. There is tremendous potential in each 15-year-old, but there is also a wide range of ability.

A high standard for one student is another's easy hop. No individual standard is well-suited for all.

The so-called Learning Results Maine has adopted are too academically oriented and overly rigorous. To ensure that every student can "calculate a 90 percent confidence interval," we force students into courses they do not want or need, and we water down courses so that students forced into them have a reasonable chance of success. Almost every student is badly served by this model.

We insist students take "more" courses, often providing fewer choices. In one Maine technical school, students can no longer take a second year of welding. They must take more academic courses.