Ohio Looking To Repeal Common Core

And so the repeal CCFS movement rolls on:

Just weeks before Ohio children return to school, conservative lawmakers introduced a last-minute bill yesterday to block new and more-rigorous curriculum guidelines championed by governors and education leaders.

Opponents of the Common Core standards hope to throw the brakes on what they fear is a federal takeover of education. Rep. Andrew Thompson, R-Marietta, said local districts and state leaders should be the ones deciding what’s best for Ohio students.

“I’m not sure the Common Core standards are that great,” he said. “Beyond that, I don’t think Ohio is just like California or just like Montana.”

In Ohio, districts must be using Common Core this fall, although many had already begun to phase in the new standards. Students will continue to use existing assessments this school year with new online PARCC testing — the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers — set to begin in the 2014-15 school year.

Thompson’s legislation, House Bill 237, would repeal Ohio’s adoption of Common Core standards, prohibit the state Board of Education from using assessments based on the standards and outlaw any state entity that deals with education from collecting data on students except for limited administrative purposes. The bill is co-sponsored by 13 other Republicans in the 99-member House.

If approved, Ohio would be the third state to thwart implementation of Common Core, which outlines what students in kindergarten through 12th grade should know in math and English language arts.

Indiana lawmakers recently passed legislation calling for a review, public hearings and fiscal analysis of the standards, and in Michigan, legislators added language to the state budget barring education officials from spending money to implement Common Core or corresponding assessments.

“Indiana has stopped. Michigan is stopping, and Ohio needs to have a serious discussion about this before we invest in an elaborate testing system,” Thompson said. “We need to do what we never did, which is to have a sit-down discussion about standards.”

In five years time, how many states do you think will still be using the Common Core standards or the "assessments" from either of the two assessment consortia?