Speaking to a mostly empty auditorium in Greenwood Sunday, two ultraconservative state senators expressed their opposition to Mississippi’s new education standards.
The meeting, organized by Concerned Citizens Against Common Core and led by Greenwood resident Roxanne Hall, drew fewer than 20 people to the Leflore County Civic Center.
Sen. Michael Watson, R-Pascagoula, and Sen. Angela Burks Hill, R-Picayune, said that the Common Core standards are costly for the state’s taxpayers and detrimental to public and private education.
The Common Core standards were designed to teach students to think more analytically and provide a metric for academic achievement across the entire country. Common Core’s opponents say it will lead to the federalization of education.
Common Core originally was adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia. Three states have since repealed it, and several others are considering legislation to drop the standards. Attempts to rescind Common Core were defeated in the Mississippi Legislature earlier this year, although the state has rebranded the standards as “Mississippi College and Career-Ready Standards.” This past spring was the first time students were tested under the new standards, and results from those tests are expected to be released later this month.
Watson said that states were coerced into accepting Common Core with promises of federal money through Race to the Top grants. The application process for Race to the Top awarded points to states that pledged to adopt career and college readiness standards in their public schools, and more points for adopting any such program that a majority of other states were entering.
Under federal law, private schools that do not receive federal funding are not required to adopt federal education mandates, but Watson and Hill said Common Core will have secondary effects on private education.
“The SAT, GED and ACT have all now been retooled or are in the process of being retooled to match the Common Core State Standards,” Watson said. “What about your private schoolers, your homeschoolers and everyone else who may not go through the Common Core?”
Hill described Common Core as the latest development in a campaign to impose federal control over public education. “This started with the creation of the United States Department of Education, which is an unconstitutional institution,” she said.
Hill said only 10 percent of the cost of implementing Common Core will be covered by the federal government, leaving Mississippi taxpayers to come up with the rest.
The Common Core website, corestandards.org, states that “standards from top-performing countries played a significant role in the development of the math and English standards.”
Watson, however, criticized Common Core for not using higher-performing standards already in place in several states. In particular, he singled out California’s pre-existing standards in mathematics and Massachusetts’ standards in English.
nContact Nick Rogers at 581-7235 or nrogers@gwcommonwealth.com.
