Education

Common Core Opponents Not Ready to Quit

March 24th, 2014

Georgia lawmakers didn’t pass legislation this year aimed at getting rid of the Common Core education standards. But on the last day of the session, the House adopted a resolution establishing a committee to review the standards. That move indicates that the standards’ detractors aren’t going anywhere.

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Georgia’s Common Core opponents didn’t like the idea of “national” standards. The standards were developed by a consortium of states, including Georgia. But states had to adopt the Common Core to apply for the federal Race to the Top grant program. To Tanya Ditty, of Concerned Women for America, and Jane Robbins, of the American Principles Project, that’s an overreach.

“They’re enforced by the federal government, but written by people outside the state as if we can’t do those,” Ditty said after a press conference.

Robbins and Ditty say Georgia adopted the Common Core because the state was desperate for the $400 million it won through the Race to the Top.

But advocates, like Michael Brickman, say that’s a straw man.

“There are a lot of things that are in Race to the Top,” he says. “Charter schools, for example, were incentivized in both Race to the Top and the No Child Left Behind waivers, but I don’t think anyone’s out there saying, no reasonable education reformer, at least, is out there saying, ‘I think we should get rid of charter schools’ just because the Obama administration incentivized it.”

Brickman is the national policy director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. He doesn’t think most Common Core opponents have a problem with the actual standards.

“I’ve talked to a lot of people about this issue over the last 6 or 9 months, and rarely, if ever, hear anybody saying, ‘This specific standard in the Common Core is something that I have a problem with,’ ” Brickman says.

Even opponents have said the larger issue is local control. Ditty, Robbins, and their organizations have thrown their support behind Sen. William Ligon, R-Brunswick, who sponsored Georgia’s anti-Common Core bill.

“You need to look very carefully at anything that is pushed down as a one-size-fits all for every state in the union,” Ligon said in an interview in his office. “I don’t believe that’s a good way to go. You lose your flexibility, you lose your autonomy, you lose things that you need in order to make adjustments for what’s right in your state.”

Ligon’s bill passed the Senate, but died in the House Education Committee. Although the Common Core will stay in place for now, opponents don’t seem ready to give up the fight.