If It Isn't Broken In Edu-Land, nothing sinks curriculum as quickly as success. Picture an urban elementary school where the students are so poor that all qualify for free lunches and some 82 percent are English learners. The students, sadly, are performing in the bottom third of the nation's students in math. Then, teachers discover a program that boosts students' performance.
Teachers are ecstatic.
Kids are smiling, a teacher tells me, when they take the STAR test. Enter educrats set to yank the program. Woe be to Heliotrope Elementary, where some 59 teachers signed a petition pleading with district pencilheads to allow them to keep the successful Saxon math program. That is very matter of fact for them. Her students' average math score last year was at the 67th percentile nationally.