Perdido 03

Perdido 03

Friday, April 4, 2014

Will Oklahoma Be The Second State To "Ditch" The Common Core?

From National Review Online:

The Oklahoma state senate passed a bill Tuesday to withdraw the state from the Common Core standards. If the bill is signed by Governor Mary Fallin, Oklahoma will become the second state to withdraw from the Common Core.

Indiana withdrew last week, with Governor Mike Pence’s signature.

The bill to get the Sooner State was hugely popular in both houses. House Bill 3399 was approved by the state house in a 78 to 12 vote before being sent to the state senate for amendments. On Tuesday, the state senate voted 37 to 10 in favor of the bill. The bill will now go to the House for another vote before being sent to the governor’s desk.

Oklahoma was one of the first states to adopt the Common Core standards in June of 2010, after a vote by the state board of education. However, the Sooner State later dropped out of the Common Core’s standardized testing consortium in the summer of 2013.

State representative Jason Nelson, an author and co-sponsor to withdraw the state from the CCSS, told NRO the bill will pass the Assembly a second time and be signed into law by the governor.

Some of these states that are allegedly dumping Common Core are simply renaming the standards and making minor changes - and Oklahoma sorta sounds like they're going down that road.

Listen to the ed jargon from Governor Fallin:

Fallin wrote that she would support legislation repealing the Common Core, if the legislation “increases classroom rigor and accountability while guaranteeing that Oklahoma public education is protected from federal interference.”

And indeed, here is what the bill, if passed into law, would do:

HB 3399 still allows the Oklahoma state board of education — in consultation with the state’s higher education and vocational training systems– to preserve aspects of the Common Core standards, if it so chooses.

“Specifically, the bill says that the state cannot cede its control over our standards or our student assessments,” Nelson says, “or relinquish our authority over those standards and assessments.” The bill, he says, would still leave the state free to use selected Common Core standards.

So while it sounds exciting that Oklahoma is potentially joining Indiana in dropping the CCSS, the devil is in the details of what comes next if and when the bill is signed into law.

There's an awful lot of posturing on the part of legislators trying to make the CCSS critics and opponents happy while keeping the CCSS basically in place.

We've certainly seen that in NY State and we're kinda seeing that in states that are allegedly "dropping" CCSS too.

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