John Barge, Georgia’s state school superintendent and a trained educator, clearly knows the value of the Common Core education standards to Georgia’s future. Back in 2011, in an address to Georgia teachers, he lauded Common Core as “an extremely important opportunity for Georgia to join the vast majority of other states in the country in transforming education and improving the global competitiveness of the United States.”
It’s hard to imagine a more enthusiastic embrace of the program. Since then, however, a flood of distortions, misinformation and outright lies about Common Core has burbled up from the right wing of Barge’s Republican Party, most of them inspired by the conspiratorial notion that Common Core is “ObamaCore,” an underhanded federal effort to seize control of Georgia schools and the minds of its schoolchildren.
To his credit, Barge has tried to correct the record, pointing out that the education standards are the creation of governors and state education officials, not the federal government, and that Georgia played a large role in drafting those standards. But from some of his more recent comments, you also get the sense that there are political limits to Barge’s willingness to defend Common Core, and that limit is approaching quickly.
The same seems true of Gov. Nathan Deal. He too is on the record in support of Common Core, telling the Marietta Daily Journal that “the federal government did not mandate it, they did not control it, they did not dictate its content.” In an effort to defuse conservative opposition, Deal has also issued an executive order that “protects” the state from some of the non-existent threats that Common Core is said to pose to Georgia’s sovereignty.
But with Deal, as with Barge, a belief that Common Core is of great value to Georgia may not be enough to keep him fighting on its behalf. The Republican National Committee has already bowed to grassroots pressure by denouncing Common Core. The Georgia Republican Party’s state committee recently did the same, unanimously supporting a resolution claiming that “adoption of Common Core obliterates Georgia’s constitutional autonomy over the educational standards for Georgia’s children.” It also demanded Georgia’s withdrawal from the Common Core initiative, which at the moment counts 45 states among its members.
The driver forcing that withdrawal would presumably be legislation passed next year in the General Assembly, where leadership has no pride of authorship or involvement in Common Core. Responding to a question in a recent interview, for example, House Speaker David Ralston noted the misinformation being spread about Common Core and the need to correct it. However, his word choice and body language suggested that if the time comes, he has no intention of spending a lot of political capital trying to block a legislative groundswell against Common Core, as seems likely.
In other words, this has the makings of a mess. Common Core is a good idea that has been competently executed. It is a voluntary effort by state leaders to develop a uniform standard that schools around the country can aspire to achieve and measure themselves against. But as a matter of good politics, as opposed to good policy, Republican leaders have little to gain and a lot to lose in defending it.
For them, it’s not a complicated equation: They have nothing to fear from the Democrats or the general election voter; their only threat comes from their conservative party’s conservative wing. And that in turn gives that group disproportionate power over Georgia’s future.
