30 October 2014

Lawmaker Says 'Trickery' Slipped Common Core into Alaska School Districts

From the Alaska Dispatch News:


JUNEAU -- State Rep. Lora Reinbold, R-Eagle River, is on a mission to root out "Common Core," the new educational standards that have become a target of the tea party movement, from Alaska schools.

At a Wednesday hearing of the Joint Administrative Regulation Review Committee, chair Reinbold grilled Mike Hanley, commissioner of the Department of Education and Early Development.


Hanley said Alaska has adopted its own "Alaska Academic Standards," not the Common Core that many other states have adopted as part of a national education reform effort.

But Reinbold said those Alaska standards were so similar to the Common Core that they might as well be the same thing, and she spent much of the hearing trying to prove that, parsing previous Hanley statements on similarities and differences

"You were telling all the legislators that we weren't doing Common Core," she said. "We were being misled."



Local school districts around the state adopt the standards they want their students to strive for, and then select a curriculum to be taught that they think will help them get there.

But the Alaska Legislature last year adopted a prohibition on Hanley's department expending any money to implement Common Core. He told legislators at the time that the prohibition was meaningless because they weren't doing it anyway.

But Reinbold said she concluded the differences between the Alaska Academic Standards and Common Core were so slight that they were the same {snip}...
Some Alaska school districts, including Anchorage and Copper River, have adopted Common Core, while others have gone with the Alaska standards. Anchorage adopted the tougher standards before the state created its own.

Reinbold said the prohibition adopted by the Legislature barred that. She said "trickery" was used to keep on using Common Core despite the prohibition.

Many other districts are purchasing and using curriculum materials that are aligned to the national Common Core Standards, she said.


The argument, er, article continues, here.

2 comments:

hobo said...

If the state accepted the federal 'stimulus' money for education, they had to adopt the common core standards but just under the state label. Blinded by those dollar signs they didn't read the fine print. They sold their children all for the sake of getting that precious federal money.

Rev. Paul said...

hobo, that's the way I see it, too.