Conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher highlights the bright initial instincts of Governor Sarah Palin and Governor Rick Perry on the Common Core in a Real Clear Politics op-ed:
Sarah Palin was the first to recognize the problem: By participating in President Obama’s signature education initiative, the Common Core Standards, Alaska would lose control over its own curriculum.
On May 31, 2009, then-Gov. Palin announced Alaska would adopt a “watch and wait” attitude:
“If this initiative produces useful results, Alaska will remain free to incorporate them,” Gov. Palin said, adding that “high expectations are not always created by new, mandated federal standards written on paper. They are created in the home, the community and the classroom.”
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, to his credit, was the next to recognize a federal boondoggle when he saw one: “I will not commit Texas taxpayers to unfunded federal obligations or to the adoption of unproven, cost-prohibitive national standards and tests,” Gov. Perry wrote in a Jan. 13, 2010, letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
In the ensuing two years, it’s become clear that Perry and Palin — two core conservative figures whose intelligence is routinely mocked by liberal “sophisticates” — were brilliantly prescient, indeed prophetic.
Common Core Standards turn out to be like Obamacare — you don’t really know what’s in it until after you pass it and are mired in its tentacles.
Maggie Gallagher correctly identifies the Common Core State Standards Initiative as an Obama Administration initiative. Â For years, various pro-Common Core advocates had claimed that the Common Core was “state led” until President Obama proved unable to resist the opportunity to gloat in his 2012 State of the Union and proclaimed this doozy:
For less than 1 percent of what our nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every state in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning — the first time that’s happened in a generation.
After highlighting the numerous problems with the Common Core, she calls on the American Legislative Exchange Council to do the right thing on the Common Core:
A pivotal moment in the history of American education will quietly occur on May 11 in Charlotte, N.C., when the board of the influential (and under fire) conservative American Legislative Exchange Council will meet to decide whether or not to accept its own education task force’s recommendation of model legislation blocking implementation of Obama’s Common Core.
“We eagerly anticipate that the ALEC Board will affirm the task force vote,” said Emmett McGroarty, who works with the American Principles Project, which co-sponsored the Pioneer study and which lobbied for model legislation at ALEC. (Full disclosure: One of my projects, the Culture War Victory Fund, is also housed at APP.)
Obama’s Common Core Standards violate federal laws in order to take over control of curriculum, on behalf of an unproven education initiative that leaves states $16 billion in debt.
Sarah Palin and Rick Perry are proven to be prophets. ALEC, you know what to do.
Read the whole article here.
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