Committee to Study Federal Government’s Hand in Education
A new statewide committee made up of educators, lawmakers, parents and grandparents met for the first time Wednesday. The group is charged with investigating the federal government’s role in state education.
Hear the broadcast version of this story.
At issue are the Common Core standards. Developed by states to provide consistent math and English standards, 48 states initially signed on. But critics claim the federal government was really behind it all, trying to exert control.
In a recent interview with WABE, State Schools Superintendent John Barge said the Common Core wasn’t controversial at first.
“We had the best example here in Georgia of the reason why we need some common standards, and that was our move to integrated math that we did years ago,” he said. “We were the only state in the country teaching math that way.”
Barge said that created chaos. Students couldn’t transfer credits across state lines. He reiterated that point Wednesday and explained that governors and state school chiefs led the Common Core initiative.
Gwinnett County Superintendent Alvin Wilbanks said one of his high schools hosted a national Common Core rollout event in 2010.
“It was in the auditorium; it was full,” Wilbanks said. “There were people there from all over the country. But here’s a point I would like for you to understand, there was no one, not a single individual from the U.S. Dept. of Education there.”
And, no, Wilbanks said, the state wasn’t coerced into adopting the Common Core to compete for a federal Race to the Top grant, as some critics have claimed.
“Nowhere in the Race to the Top application–nowhere–did it require a state or a district to adopt the Common Core standards,” he said. “One of the four elements of Race to the Top was standards and assessment, meaning that you did need to make standards higher.”
Wilbanks was on Georgia’s Race to the Top team.
Officials also tried to quell fears about student data sharing. The state doesn’t share personally identifiable data with federal officials, they said.
Rep. Brooks Coleman, R-Duluth, co-chairs the committee. He said he went to the rollout in Gwinnett before the controversy began.
“I was there, Sonny Perdue was there, all these governors, and the auditorium was full, rolled ‘em out, and they had been vetted,” Coleman said. “My daughter’s a teacher, and they had head them and looked at them, all that stuff. They’d been vetted.”
Coleman said the committee will need to make sure the correct information gets out.
The group plans to hold its next meeting in August, where it will listen to public comments.
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