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National
Review
Why
There’s a Backlash against
Common Core
Decisions about standards should be
made at the state and local level.
By Lindsey M. Burke
April
8, 2013
The
federal government has spent
billions to move Common Core forward, and it has put billions more on
the line.
Unfortunately, parents, teachers, tea-party activists, and governors
have every
reason to believe Common Core represents major, unprecedented federal
intervention into education.
In
a speech to the National
Governor’s Association in 2010, President Obama stated:
I
want to commend all of you for
acting collectively through the National Governors Association to
develop
common standards that will better position our students for success.
And today,
I’m announcing steps to encourage and support all states to transition
to
college and career-ready standards on behalf of America’s students.
First, as a
condition of receiving access to Title I funds, we will ask all states
to put
in place a plan to adopt and certify standards that are college and
career-ready in reading and math.
In
addition to the rhetorical
support, Education Secretary Arne Duncan famously chastised South
Carolinians
for even considering withdrawing, calling the Palmetto State’s concerns
“a conspiracy
theory in search of a conspiracy.”
Washington
is financing the two
national testing consortia that are creating the Common Core
assessments.
Lawmakers have tied $4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants to the
adoption of
standards similar to those found in a significant number of states, and
they’ve
made the adoption of Common Core a major factor in securing a No Child
Left
Behind waiver. And now, they have established a technical-review panel
to work
with the testing consortia on item design and validation.
For
an undertaking that claims to
be largely free of federal involvement, Common Core has quite a few
federal
fingerprints on it.
Concerns
about nationalizing the
content taught in every public school in America aren’t limited to
“tea-party
activists,” as Kathleen Porter-Magee and Sol Stern implied on NRO last
week.
Nor should the concerns of the Tea Party be dismissed. They express the
understandable fear of many moms and dads and teachers that the federal
government is on the brink of dictating the content taught in every
school.
Their concerns are echoed by a wide array of groups and citizens,
including
academics, members of state boards of education, residents of local
school
districts, and analysts at public-policy foundations.
Their
sentiments mirror the
concerns of the governors who have opposed Common Core national
standards from
the beginning. “I don’t want to have a federal bureaucracy monitoring
whether
or not we are having the right programs in our schools,” said Virginia
governor
Bob McDonnell recently. “The bottom line is, we don’t need the federal
government with the Common Core telling us how to run our schools in
Virginia.
We’ll use our own system, which is very good. It’s empirically tested.”
Texas
governor Rick Perry, never
one to mince words, said, “The academic standards of Texas are not for
sale.”
A
bill introduced by the chair of
the Senate Education Committee in Alabama to reverse the state’s Common
Core
adoption failed by just one vote in committee last month. Common Core
opponents
have vowed to keep fighting. Colorado recently held hearings taking a
second
look at Common Core adoption. “It’s a discussion that had never
occurred but
needed to occur,” said Bob Schaffer, former chairman of the state board
of
education.
Read
the rest of the article at National Review
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