Public education should always be an issue treated with the utmost seriousness.
Some North Carolina leaders failed to do that this week, and the result was a problematic bill Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law yesterday, setting the stage for the replacement of Common Core standards, a set of guidelines for what level of mastery students should have over English and mathematics upon the completion of each grade.
The law sets up a commission to draw up new educational standards, even though the state has already spent $66 million preparing to adopt Common Core standards according to WRAL.
Those costs were covered by a federal grant, but that figure doesn’t include additional funds spent by local school districts preparing to adopt the standards.
Thankfully the version of the bill McCrory signed was not an earlier House version, which would have banned the use of Common Core standards entirely, ensuring that all of the money spent preparing to implement them would have been wasted.
Instead, the governor signed a more sensible version of the bill that simply allows the commission to update or replace as many Common Core standards as the members of the commission see fit.
The effectiveness of Common Core standards are not yet clear and they have not been in place long enough for definitive evaluation. Giving up at this stage of their implementation would be foolish and wasteful.
The commission set up by the law should be wary of making substantial changes in standards that have not had a chance to be effectively implemented yet.
If the commission’s changes are minimal, as they should be, then that means state leaders were using public education to do little more than political grandstanding.
