Health & Fitness
Common Core, a new national educational curriculum, revisited
The resistance stems from reasons including questions about who was behind the initiative and whether they are better than previous standards.
On February 22 posted at Lake Forest Patch was information about Common Core, a new national educational curriculum launched by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers in 2009 -- latched onto by the Obama administration -- whose plan is to induce all elementary and secondary schools to accept a comprehensive national education system that will enforce a national curriculum. http://lakeforest.patch.com/blog_posts/illinois-schools-latch-on-to-unte...
Some flack was experienced in comments made to my blog post, also posted at Northbrook Patch on February 22.
Since then the "Heritage Foundation" on March 2nd published an article that relates how states are reconsidering their support for the Common Core standards. The resistance stems from reasons including questions about who was behind the initiative and whether they are better than previous standards.
Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, and South Dakota are states in which action was taken in recent weeks to pedal back their state's involvement in Common Core standards http://blog.heritage.org/tag/common-core-standards/
As one South Dakota state representative commented when South Dakota's House Education Committee passed legislation to require the Board of Education to obtain legislative approval before adopting any further Common Core Standards:
"One of the founding principles of American education is that states and local citizens will determine how their schools are going to be run and what will be taught in each local entity. The Common Core Standards movement is an attempt to circumvent this long-standing tradition of American education."
Shouldn't parents, teacher and local leaders make decision about what is taught in the classrooms? States, including Illinois, who early on signed on to Common Core, should reject Washington's push for national education standards and work to improve their schools through reforms at the state and local level
Central planning sounds right. It feels good. But it has nothing to do with the realities of economics and science. There is nothing that government can do that we cannot do better as free individuals and as groups of individuals, working together voluntarily, not at the point of a gun or under threat of a fine. Without big government, our possibilities are limitless.
Consider the government-run entities of Amtrak and the U.S. Postal System. 2014 will usher in an even greater government-run boondoggle that is Obamacare.
