Sarah Perry
Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma has done what
might once have been improbable, and
signed a bill removing from the Sooner State
every vestige of the Common Core State
Standards Initiative.
Oklahoma is just the latest state to mount a
legislative revolt against Common Core. It
appears the scales are off the eyes of an
increasing number of Americans, those who
were made to believe that federal meddling
in education was best for their children, best
for commerce, and perhaps most critically,
their own idea. They were sold whole cloth
on the concept that all state educational
benchmarks needed to be chucked in favor of
an initiative that arose from corporate edu-
crats whose interests were intrinsically tied
to the standards themselves; standards that in
the words of Bill Gates, Common Core’s
money man, were geared toward creating a
“ large uniform base of customers.”
Indiana led the way when it formally
withdrew from the Common Core State
Standards Initiative in March. In an effort to
retain federal funding and No Child Left
Behind Waivers, Gov. Mike Pence substituted
standards “ by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers ” that
were nothing more than a simple re-branding
of the previous Core material.
Despite this, Indiana’s withdrawal is proving
to be the critical crack in the fed-led
education dam. On Indiana’s heels, law
makers in South Carolina, North Carolina,
Missouri, and Oklahoma have taken up the
cause, and passed legislation to withdraw
from the Core Standards.
South Carolina’s Gov. Nikki Haley made clear
her enmity for the Standards from the start,
stating that she would continue to fight
implementation of the Core “ until it’s no
longer part of our school system’s
curriculum .” On May 30th, she made good on
that promise, signing into law H 3893 that
required the development of new, non-Core
standards by the 2015-2016 academic year.
Shortly thereafter on June 5, Gov. Mary Fallin
of Oklahoma signed HB 3399 nullifying
Common Core in her state. As the chair of the
National Governor’s Association – the
organization that co-sponsored the initiative
and holds the copyright to the Standards –
her decision to dump them is a political wild
card. The bill ensures the standards are
meticulously compared with previous Core
standards so there isn’t a back-door re-
introduction, as per Indiana. Fallin stated,
“What should have been a bipartisan policy
is now widely regarded as the president’s
plan to establish federal control of curricula,
testing and teaching strategies.”
HB 1061 was filed in North Carolina with the
strong support of Lt. Gov. Dan Forest who
also serves on the state education board, and
who has made vocal his support for the
elimination of Core standards in favor of
those drafted from scratch by the State Board.
Similar legislation is currently under
consideration in the Senate. While Missouri
Gov. Jay Nixon hasn’t indicated which way
he leans on his state’s bill , if ratified, the
legislation would allow teachers to continue
using any recently adopted standards while a
committee of educators, parents, and
business leaders develops new standards to
be put into effect in two years. Louisiana's
Gov. Bobby Jindal has revised his original
position on Core, and is now considering
executive action to withdraw his state from
the Standards and the PARCC testing
consortium that would administer uniform
tests based on those standards, stating : "We
can have rigorous standards without giving
control to the federal government. Parents
deserve a voice in this debate."
And on it goes.
It may well be that the privacy-violating
databases required by the Core program are
tipping the scales against it. The Department
of Education’s Faustian report of February
2013 elucidates federally funded and
mandated student databases that not only
include academic information, but can
similarly be used to create a personal dossier
comprised of “ health-care history,
disciplinary record, family income range,
family voting status, and religious
affiliation .” The DOE report seeks to
catalogue “ attributes, dispositions, social
skills, attitudes, and intrapersonal resources,
independent of intellectual ability ,” under the
guise of tracked and tailor-made academic
rigor.
If this period of American wakefulness has
taught us anything, it’s that despite the lure of
language like “rigorous” and “benchmarked,”
or the pledge of success in “college, career
and life,” We The People will only be fooled
once.
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