Our Children are Lab Rats
When you give a presentation often there are things brought up that never get fully addressed, or conversations overheard that need a little correcting. These are some answers to those that resulted from our presentation in Burley.
Overheard afterwards: “You never hear of any problems here in Idaho. You only ever hear of them in other states.”
This is true for one reason; Idaho is slower implementing Common Core than many other states. So, we have two courses of action. Idaho can stay the course and in a few years have the same problems other states are now experiencing. Or we can use our delayed implementation time to our advantage and stop Common Core before we reach the stage were we’re having the same problems other states are currently undergoing.
In response to the fact that Common Core hasn’t been piloted anywhere we heard: “Do you know how long it would take to pilot and test something like Common Core? It could take up to a decade!”
That’s exactly the point! Why are our children literally being used as experimental lab rats for such sweeping changes that really need much more time to develop and revise before implementation?
Did you know that it takes up to 12 years and $350million to get a new drug from the laboratory to the pharmacy shelf? Pharmaceutical companies spend three and a half years laboratory testing a compound before even applying to the FDA for testing on humans!
Then, the FDA has a rather arduous, three-phase, process they follow to make certain that a drug is safe. Phase one consists of 20-80 volunteers and lasts one year. Phase two lasts for two years and has 100-300 people. Phase three employs 1000-3000 people and lasts for three years. After the FDA completes all of this testing the company then must submit a 100,000 page application for approval. After all that, the FDA will then take on average about two and a half years to approve the application! Only then is a new drug allowed on the market.
If a drug had been allowed on the market as willy-nilly as Common Core has been allowed into our classrooms all sorts of alarms would have be going off! Aren’t our children’s minds just as valuable as their bodies? Shouldn’t the same care be taken with their educational health as their physical health? Instead a new “drug” has been unleashed on a whole population of children all at once. We’re testing the drug as we go, hoping that a few years from now we won’t find that the drug was really a deadly poison.
So, you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t mind the idea of Common Core being tested for a few years. I personally think my kids, and everyone else’s for that matter, are worth it.
