Across the nation, people are realizing that they have been excluded from exercising one of their most treasured rights: the right to control the education of their children. Their voices, as well as those of local educators and school boards, have been muted by federal strings attached to grants for too long.
The Race to the Top grant has taken the situation to a new level. Nationwide, the vigorous objections to RTTT mandates include the questionable quality of unpiloted Common Core standards, the expensive testing component, the collection and sharing of personal information on students — approximately 400 data points, the unproven teacher-evaluation system, the increased taxation that will necessarily occur to pay for unfunded mandates, and the fact that the Common Core violates the spirit, if not the letter, of three federal laws that prohibit federal direction of curriculum.
Currently, the Common Core represents uniform, multi-state standards in mathematics and English language arts, and other top-down uniform standards are in the pipeline. Though the official talking points claim the effort was “state-led,” that point stretches credulity when the actual input from the states was minimal at best (and in the case of the legislatures, non-existent).
The Georgia Senate Education and Youth Committee recently heard from education experts who warned of the dangers of the Common Core. Sandra Stotsky, perhaps the nation’s leading expert on ELA standards and a member of the Common Core Validation Committee, refused to sign off on the ELA standards, which she called “empty-skill sets.”
The Common Core math standards are similarly deficient. James Milgram from Stanford University, the only mathematician on the Validation Committee, refused to sign off on them, concluding that students “educated” under Common Core would be about two years behind their peers in other countries by eighth grade.
The claim that the Common Core is more “rigorous” than Georgia’s previous standards does not hold up. The Fordham Institute gave Georgia’s former standards the same overall rating as the Common Core’s. Yet, Georgia’s executive branch was willing to trade the state’s sovereignty over education to unaccountable Washington bureaucrats and trade associations for a mere $400 million doled out over four years.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington – that only DC elites are competent to manage our lives (and our children) – I believe what our Founders believed: liberty is best preserved when control is exercised close to home. In no area is this truth more fundamental than the education of our children.
My bill to withdraw Georgia from Common Core, the aligned assessments and the intrusive data tracking on students is part of the movement to reassert our constitutional autonomy over education. The prevailing sovereignty of the states in matters of K-12 education both reflects and promotes the commonsense competence of the people. To weaken that sovereignty will, over time, undermine self-rule and individual initiative as well as the education of our children.
