Jamestown students have massive failure rates on state assessments. A four-year failure average of 79 percent for grades 3-8 reveals a consistent pattern: high failure rates every year in every grade in both ELA and math. Students never overcome their deficits as they advance through the grades. A whopping 93 percent of grade 8 students failed the math assessment (2016), with 60 percent placing in Level 1, “well below proficient.” Now in grade 9, these students are unprepared for high school algebra and higher mathematics. These data spell travesty for Jamestown students!

Poor academic performance leads to a host of behavioral problems: from withdrawing mentally to rebelliousness to dropping out. In 2010-11 the NY School Violence Index recorded 210 incidents of violent and disruptive behaviors for Jamestown. Four years later, 468 incidents were recorded, a whopping 123 percent increase!

High failure rates are the outcome of collective folly by state policy makers. Regents and the state education department signed onto the non-validated Common Core and strongly pressured districts to implement it. Superintendent Mains and the board willingly complied and set Jamestown children on a path to failure and our district to ruination. No “shining beacon” here. Actions by policy makers and complicit boards are reprehensible. All are culpable! All robbed young children of their legal right to a true and substantial public education.

Low-income and Hispanic subgroups were targeted as problematic for the district’s data dilemma. Is this logical with a shocking 79 percent failure rate? Hardly! This is a system-wide problem. It is indisputable: the district cannot implement crappy Common Core curricula that have no proven worth and no research validation and expect solid proficiency performance, no matter how many coaches are hired. Jamestown students are being deprived of the most important skills necessary for future learning.

Mains’ solution to the subgroup problem is differentiated instruction (“Test Scores Pose Concern for JPS,” The Post-Journal, Sept. 4, 2016): “It tailors learning to the students in front of you.” He added, “I can differentiate the process, content or the product, and I base that differentiate instruction on the students’ readiness and learning style.” Bunk, Mr. Mains.

Dr. John Hattie, professor and director of the Melbourne [Australia] Education Research Institute, warned: “Be wary, and distrustful, of any theory-based scheme that informs you there are different types of students sitting in your class that need to be taught in different ways” (Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn, 2014).

Hattie added that “there is not any recognised evidence suggesting that knowing or diagnosing learning styles will help [teachers] to teach students any better than not knowing their learning style.” The idea of visual learners and auditory learners in the same class has no neurological or behavioral performance basis for such classifications. The tragedy from Mains’s folly is two-fold: students are deprived of the rightful rigorous education they need and taxpayers are forced to pay for programs that are worthless.

Hattie, groundbreaking researcher, author, and international consultant to governments, added: “More than one hundred years of research goes into the following idea: once we get beyond basic notions such as gender and demographic traits such as race, religion and socioeconomic status, it becomes relatively difficult to pigeonhole any one individual.” One hundred years of research counters Mr. Mains’s pretentious nonsense!

Low-income and Hispanic students have knowledge chasms. But extremely high failure rates speak to system-wide knowledge gaps leading to cognitive loads too high for student problem solving. Because we are a district of poverty, two implementations become imperative for closing knowledge chasms: 1) curricula must be used that are powerful, research-validated and of proven worth, and 2) students must be placed at their instructional levels. It’s obvious that theses measures currently do not exist.

Hattie praised Direct Instruction (DI): “The underlying principles of Direct Instruction place it among the most successful outcomes.” DI curricula are powerful. Fifty years of proven success and research mark DI as a no-brainer choice for districts serious about raising achievement levels in language arts and math. All children benefit from DI programs but they are especially powerful for children of poverty, disabled children, and second language learners using structured immersion.

Legal authority rests with the board. Four years of horrendously high failure data are a result of poor leadership and failed policies. Continuation on this path with the current superintendent will lead to further district ruination as Mr. Mains appears to lack necessary knowledge for raising student achievement. Isn’t it time for the board to act honorably in its legal responsibility to district students and the taxpaying community? Too many Jamestown students already paid a high and tragic price! Ditto for taxpayers!

Deann Nelson has a doctorate in educational psychology from University at Buffalo.