Three Exit Strategies from the Common Core for State Leadership

Good stuff from Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation:

State leaders who believe that previous state leaders have surrendered control of their standards-setting authority to national organizations and Washington have an exit strategy they can pursue. States should consider the following three strategies:

1. Determine how the decision was made to cede the state’s standard-setting authority. States can exit from the national standards overreach by first determining which state entity agreed to adopt the Common Core State Standards. For most states, the state board of education is the body that made the decision.
2. Prohibit new spending for standards implementation. State leaders should request an independent cost analysis of national standards adoption to inform taxpayers about the short-term and long-term costs of the overhaul.
3. Determine how to reverse course. The rushed adoption of the Common Core in many cases preceded the election of 2010, which brought in new governors, legislators, and board members. Newly elected conservative leaders should be concerned about the authority handed to centralizers by their predecessors and investigate how to bring standards and curriculum control back into the hands of state leaders.

The movement to nationalize the content taught in local schools is a challenge to educational freedom in America that is costly in terms of liberty, not to mention dollars. State leaders are right to be cautious about the national standards push and should resist this latest federal overreach.