My “next” book came out about seven months ago — about the time my husband suffered the first of three hospitalizations related to sepsis and pressure sores. Almost no marketing has been done for this book. I am sorry about that, especially since this is a well-detailed, carefully crafted book. I meld my classroom experiences with the theory that undermined and even sabotaged those experiences.

Fortunately, the book remains relevant. History sometimes gains relevance with time, as results support and even confirm expectations.

The Common Core Wasteland: How No Child Left Behind, Rigid Standards, and Overtesting Left Our Children Behind emphasizes the history of the last two decades in US education. In historical terms, the ink on the page of these events is barely dry,

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Common Core State Standards Initiative swept away whole child education in favor of focusing on standardized curricula and new test-score targets. The far-reaching implications of teaching to inflexible, predetermined goals were downplayed or even ignored. As curricula, instruction and assessments became one-size-fits-all, individualized instruction suffered — a natural consequence when almost all students were expected to take identical tests regardless of their circumstances or background knowledge.

Lost students became more lost, sometimes catastrophically so. In academically struggling areas, differentiated, student-centered learning vanished, replaced by frantic, furious pushes to improve test score results. At worst, all students in a grade might end up using a virtually identical curriculum, one based on expected state test questions, regardless of whether those students were in general education, special education, gifted and talented, or bilingual programs. Supports for outlying students fell away, sacrificed to pedagogical approaches intended to boost spring state test scores. The opportunity gap and its many facets — the wealth gap, resource gap, literacy gap, vocabulary gap, food scarcity gap and technology gap ended up being all but ignored by government leaders, and then by school district administrators and even teachers — who realized their continued employment might depend upon cooperating with the latest government mandates.

In 2020, the US technology gap hit schools particularly hard: Financially challenged districts scrambled to buy technology for online learning that wealthier districts already had put into place years previously. This book explains why pandemic learning loss and a resulting widening of the achievement gap had become inevitable, given the hidden costs of NCLB and the Common Core.

The Common Core Wasteland and its companion book, Fighting the White Knight, use classroom examples to show what happens when all-encompassing national government mandates hijack local education.