On June 24th of next week, 16 school district primaries will be held in Maryland and Utah, with 152 candidates vying for 44 seats. Alpine School District, the largest school district in Utah, has provided a glimpse into assessing the damage that support for Common Core State Standards–and in this case, alleged misconduct by the School Board against parents who oppose them–will be in future elections.
A report published June 17 by Ballotpedia highlights a lawsuit filed against the Board in February 2014 by parents of an 11-year-old child cites retaliation against the child for the parents’ reaching out to anti-Common Core group as they sought an “Individual Education Plan” for their child. According to Utahns against Common Core, this is the first lawsuit where Common Core is a participant.
Ballotpedia’s Nick Katers writes that the election has been “overshadowed” by the lawsuit controversy, in which the parents allege:
When parents and teachers first began sounding the alarm about the abysmal Common Core federal overhaul of our heretofore state-based education system, it was hard to get even national legislators to take note of the most disquieting elements of the plan. For me, those include the removal of Euclidean geometry, cutting literature, cutting vocabulary acquisition, breathtaking amount of data collection on children and their parents, and the removal of the teacher’s ability to tailor education to the child.
Common Core advocates may have hoped they could fly under the radar–and have even deployed at minimum $200 million of the Gates Foundation‘s money to groups including “conservative” Arthur Brooks’s American Enterprise Institute, which received $1 million to fund their approval–but parents, teachers, and children keep thwarting their plans.
Just last week Reason reported on one classroom of 6th graders in Ipswich, MA, randomly selected as guinea pigs for testing the standardized tests, demanding compensation for the hours spent essentially product-testing for the nonprofit consortium running the process.
What the lawsuit in Utah reveals is exactly what Common Core advocates don’t want you to realize, just yet. That the role of parents in their children’s education necessarily is at odds with the federal standards. That any moves made to question Common Core may involve reciprocation against your child.
On the plus side, through this issue parents are being drawn into the public square like never before. If Common Core becomes a topic of conversation at every school board election, our children’s futures will be the better for it.
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