With the Senate passage of SB 167, Georgia scored a victory against Common Core for parents and students. This is the strongest anti-national standards legislation to make it out of a legislative chamber in the nation. It is fitting that since Georgia claims credit for moving the nation into this mess, Georgia should take responsibility to lead us out.
The essential problem with Common Core is that it embraces and exacerbates everything that has damaged public education over the last 40 to 50 years. Why should we believe that doing more of what failed in the past will succeed in the future?
First, Common Core increases the centralization and loss of local control that have damaged education. It places control over the standards into the hands of not just distant, unresponsive governments, but of unaccountable private interests in Washington.
One of these private interests is the Gates Foundation, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting Common Core. Much of that went to the Common Core owners, the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. Millions more went to other organizations to buy their support, such as the Chamber of Commerce (which has been earning its Gates money in Georgia).
The federal government then enforced Common Core by offering stimulus money to states that would adopt it. For Georgia, the lure of $400 million – a mere $100 million a year in an annual education budget of over $13 billion (state and local taxes) – took precedence over maintaining state sovereignty and local accountability in education.
These standards will drive curriculum; that’s the point of standards. As Bill Gates declared, “Identifying common standards is not enough. … When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well.” While local school systems will continue to choose their own textbooks, the right to choose one Common Core textbook over another Common Core textbook is hardly meaningful control over curriculum.
Nor will teachers be as free to teach with proven methods. Common Core dictates that English teachers spend less than half their time on literature and the majority on nonfiction “informational texts” that supposedly will prepare students for jobs. However, all research evidence supports our own common sense – that students will be better educated by studying Milton and Dickens than reading EPA regulations.
Math teachers must similarly adopt ineffective, developmentally inappropriate teaching techniques. The math standards delay teaching the standard algorithms – the way math has always been learned – in favor of cumbersome, confusing “alternative” approaches. These Common Core approaches are exactly the opposite of those used by top-performing countries.
Common Core is admittedly not designed to prepare students for science, technology, engineering, math or selective universities. This is because it places Algebra I in high school, much later than top-scoring countries do. Students on the regular Common Core track won’t be able to reach calculus in high school, which is necessary for entry into selective technology-based universities such as Georgia Tech. In fact, Common Core truncates even the Algebra II course and includes almost no trigonometry or pre-calculus. Federal statistics show that less than 40 percent of students who stop with Algebra II will ever earn a bachelor’s degree.
Consider the track record of the groups behind this scheme. Common Core co-creator Achieve Inc. is known for its previous American Diploma Project — a failure. The federal government is known for the U.S. Department of Education, America 2000, Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind — all failures. The Gates Foundation poured millions into its Small Schools Initiative — a failure.
SB 167 is the first reassertion of Georgia authority over educational standards and testing since Common Core was adopted. This carefully crafted bill which, contrary to ridiculous rumors, does not affect tests such as SAT or AP, allows local districts to exit Common Core and protects students from data mining. If the House passes SB 167 intact, Georgia’s parents and educators will do a far better job on Georgia standards than did the billionaire boys’ club.
