Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-WFP) said he is moving forward with the Common Core standards in his state, despite the fact that more states are attempting to extricate themselves from the controversial education initiative that is the brainchild of political, educational, and corporate elites.
“There’s no going back,” Malloy said Thursday during a press conference in Hartford, according to Christine Stuart at CT News Junkie.
In fact, Malloy announced that he will be including additional funding for implementation of Common Core. The state education department will allot $2 million from its existing budget for professional development for language arts and math instruction, and an additional $10 million, to the $24 million already allocated, for school technology upgrades to support transition to the Common Core.
The $10 million for school technology upgrades will be added to the state Bond Commission agenda.
The press conference focus was the release of recommendations from the Common Core Task Force created by Malloy through an executive order. The task force never considered a halt to the implementation of Common Core or an exit from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), which is creating a test aligned with the Common Core standards.
Malloy is seeking a second term this year and has the reputation of following in lock-step with the Obama administration and the teachers unions on most issues. He was asked if he felt politically vulnerable moving forward with Common Core when other governors are running from the initiative.
“I’ve always felt vulnerable politically,” Malloy said. “My whole entire life. It goes with the fact that you run for office as opposed to not running for office. But if you’re asking does any of that shade in any way my commitment as a public servant to doing what’s right? The answer is, ‘no it doesn’t.'”
Malloy dismissed criticism of the Common Core as jargon and added that teachers he has spoken to support the standards because they say their students will be more prepared for college and careers. The governor said he believes Common Core is the best way to achieve these goals.
Diana Burns, a member of the Common Core Task Force, said there is a big misconception that Common Core is curriculum.
“It’s a framework, and teachers have the ability to teach it in any fashion they want to, so I think that it’s a public misconception,” Burns said. “Teachers are really supportive of it, and I just hope that’s really known.”
Burns also emphasized that Common Core should not be confused with teacher performance ratings being tied to the Common Core SBAC tests.
As Breitbart News reported in January, Malloy called for a slowdown of the new teacher evaluation program, that ties performance ratings to student scores on the SBAC tests, after the two teachers unions in the state complained.
A survey conducted in May of teachers from both the Connecticut Education Association (CEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in Connecticut found that 82 percent were concerned about time available to “adequately learn, develop, and implement common core standards.”
According to CT News Junkie, AFT Connecticut president Melodie Peters said teachers are more concerned about other issues than Common Core.
“But we’re working our way through it. It is about educating people,” Peters said.
Describing opposition to Common Core as a “handful of folks across the country who have an agenda to undermine,” Peters said the task force and the stakeholders in Connecticut have proven they can make Common Core their own.
However, Jonathan Pelto, who is running for governor against Malloy on the Education and Democracy Party ticket, said, “[Malloy’s] support for the Common Core and its absurd, unfair, and costly Common Core testing program is undermining our public education system and wasting scarce public dollars.”
As Breitbart News reported Thursday, a newly released Rasmussen poll finds that support for the Common Core standards among American parents with school-age children has dropped dramatically.
The telephone survey of 1,000 adults conducted June 21-22 found that only 34 percent of American adults with children of elementary or secondary school age now favor requiring all schools across the nation to meet the same Common Core education standards, an outcome that Rasmussen observes is an 18-point drop from 52 percent in early November of last year.
The Common Core standards are a federally promoted education initiative introduced in the Obama administration’s 2009 stimulus bill through a competitive grant program called Race to the Top (RttT). States could apply and compete for federal grant money, as well as waivers from No Child Left Behind restrictions, as long as they adopted a set of uniform standards, and aligned curricula and testing, that allows for a greater role of government in education, student data collection, and teacher evaluations based on student performance on assessments aligned with the standards.
The state boards of education, most of them unelected, that signed onto the unproven Common Core standards did so with little, if any, public or media scrutiny, prior to even seeing the standards themselves.
At least 35 states now have had some form of legislation raised against the standards themselves, the aligned testing, or the associated student data collection.
The standards were developed by three private organizations in Washington D.C.: the National Governors Association (NGA), the Council for Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and progressive education company Achieve, Inc. All three organizations were privately funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and none of these groups are accountable to parents, teachers, students, or taxpayers.
Bill Gates recently revealed the true purpose of the Common Core is to engineer the “huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get.”
There is no official information about who selected the individuals to write the Common Core standards. In addition, none of the writers of the math and English Language Arts standards have ever taught math, English, or reading at the K-12 level. The Standards Development Work Groups did not include any members who were high school English and mathematics teachers, English professors, scientists, engineers, parents, state legislators, early childhood educators, and state or local school board members.
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