By Dr. John Trotter

   Here's the dirty little secret that most educrats and politicians will never touch:  Standardized test scores almost invariably correlate one-to-one with socio-economic scores.   The legendary Carvin L. Brown, while serving as a professor for years at UGA, conducted studies on the correlation of test scores to free lunch counts at various schools.  If a school has a high free lunch count among its student population, this count is very predictive of the student population’s collective standardized test scores.  If the Walton High School teachers began teaching at Crim High School, and the Crim teachers began teaching at Walton, the scores would stay essentially the same.  The only substantial difference?  The new Crim teachers would think that they had died and had been sent to hell, and the new Walton teacher would think that they had been sent somewhere at least in Purgatorial realm and not pure hell.  The Law of the Large Numbers is just that...a "law" -- a principal of action which holds true, even so much that polls of four hundred representative voters nationwide can eerily predict national elections.  There are always, of course, exceptions to the rule.  Students from stable, two-parent homes with the parents being very well-educated themselves have students who score significantly higher on standardized tests than students who hail from single-parent homes surrounded by a drug-infested and crime-ridden neighborhood.  If children do not perceive that they come from a reading culture where books are plentiful in the home, then these children are not going to place a high value on reading.  If a child brings to school little or no motivation to learn to read (and very little readiness skills), then the reality of this child becoming an effective reader is very slim despite the very effective teaching which may take place in the classroom.  The key to learning is the motivation to learn.  We have heard the metaphor that "you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make the horse drink it" is ever so true in the schooling process.  The educrats and the politicians do not want to accept this.  This is, however, a reality just like the Law of Gravity is a reality.  Wishing a phenomenon not to exist cannot make the phenomenon go away.