Alveda King Urges State Lawmakers to Repeal ‘One Size Fits All’ Common Core

Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Rev. Martin Luther King, is urging the Alabama legislature to repeal the controversial Common Core standards, referring to the education initiative as “one size fits all.”

King’s open letter to the state’s lawmakers was posted on the Eagle Forum of Alabama’s website. She urged legislators to find “more creative solutions than what is offered in the one size fits all Common Core curriculum,” and observed that “mounting research indicates that COMMON CORE will do more harm than good; hurting most those least able to pull themselves up out of the current educational environment of muck and more.”

The pastor continued:

All children need to and deserve to access their full God-given potential. By design, Common Core treats every child as a statistic to be measured by standardized tests.

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Additional concerns regarding Common Core are the lack of access to parents and local communities in contributing to what children are taught and how they are tested. Please ask yourself this: “Will our students be indoctrinated against the values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in our Constitution?” These American values remain part of the sustaining success of our nation. Yet, there is a not so subtle erosion of these values. By design, Common Core will only add to this decline.  When Common Core is fully implemented, parents and our local communities will have little to no control over what is taught to our children through nationally prescribed Common Core assessments and the curriculum that has been developed to match those assessments.

King, a native of Birmingham, also wrote of the potential harms from the collection of personal student and family data associated with the Common Core initiative.

As al.com reported, the Alabama Senate Committee on Education and Youth Affairs voted 5-3 in April to repeal the Common Core standards known as the Alabama College and Career Ready Standards in that state. The bill has not advanced further, however.

State Superintendent Tommy Bice opposes the bill and says it would repeal Alabama’s waiver from the restrictions of No Child Left Behind, the one it received in exchange for adopting the Common Core standards. Bice said such an action would leave all Alabama schools lacking in adequate yearly progress.