Local teachers, administrators and the public had the chance to hear a panel speak out against Common Core Standards Saturday morning for three hours at Warsaw Community Schools’ central administration office. Republican State Sen. Dennis Kruse, District 14, Auburn, started the panel discussion with a little background on the Core Standards. “Today our topic is Common Core, which is the academic standards for education and they are the standards for the state of Indiana today. They were adopted in 2010, which is almost four years ago, and I’m one of those people who voted for it and then as time went on, I guess you could say I’ve become against it over time as I was informed,” Kruse stated. In the beginning when the CCS were presented, Kruse said everyone thought it was great and everyone bought into it. No one said anything negative about it. According to a December News-Sentinel article, “Indiana was among the first states in the country to adopt them in 2010 on the recommendation of former schools Superintendent Tony Bennett and former Gov. Mitch Daniels, both Republicans. Forty-five states have adopted them, but several are looking at dropping them.” Kruse said many “good” people came into Indiana and recommended the CCS, including former Florida Republican Governor Jeb Bush. “We ended up adopting it with the first group adopting it being the Education Roundtable, which I am a member of. I voted for it. And then it went to our education board, State Board of Education, they voted for it. They voted for it actually three times over the last 3-1/2 years,” Kruse said. “As time went on, people became interested in it and took a closer look at it and started to delve a little bit more so the curriculum came out based on Common Core... As things went off, we thought maybe this wasn’t the best thing for us.” He said the development of Common Core came through “national academic people” and they were funded in their research through a company called Achieve, a non-profit national education entity. “David Coleman at the time was one of the big guys in Achieve. And the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he founded Microsoft ... he funded Achieve early on to do this development and they went to other universities and research companies and developed these Common Core Standards,” Kruse said. Their idea, he continued, was that they would take these across the country. In order for that to happen, they felt they needed state-by-state buy-in. “So their method of marketing was to go to the (National Governors Association) and then go to the (Council of Chief State School Officers),” he said. The Foundation gave the NGA a $53 million grant and the CCSSO $35 million to $37 million, Kruse indicated, for them to do their research and have all the resources they needed to buy into the Standards. The two organizations bought into it and all but five states adopted the Common Core. “It’s not a federal program, it’s a national program. So it’s kind of a nationalization of school academic standards,” Kruse said. When those five states didn’t adopt it, people began to ask why, Kruse said. The states that did adopt it then began asking why they adopted it if those five states found reason not to. “Then some parents got concerned, materials got printed and got out in the classrooms and people started saying, ‘What is this?’ So one of the things is they have a different method of mathematics. I call it, New Math, ‘Fuzzy Math.’ I’ve looked at some of the books, and I’ve looked at some of the problems, and it’s a different way of looking at math. And then when you look at the language arts section of it, it has a different emphasis on what we call informational literature instead of classical literature,” Kruse indicated. Indiana started questioning the Core Standards and if it was the best thing for Indiana, he said. During the last session in 2013, House Bill 1427 was passed to put the Standards on pause for a year. Three public hearings at the state capitol were held last summer and fall. As a result of those hearings, Kruse said they came up with a document stating Indiana will cultivate new academic standards to be developed under six criteria. The criteria are to: utilize the highest standards in the U.S.; prepare Hoosier students for college and career success; obtain a waiver from No Child Left Behind; maintain Indiana’s sovereignty and independence from the federal government; provide strict safeguards for protecting student data; and provide effective testing to match Indiana’s rigorous standards. That criteria will be in a bill that will be filed today if it wasn’t already filed Thursday, Kruse said. “We think that the federal government will do more and more involvement and eventually the federal government will control education in the United States,” Kruse commented. “So, I made the statement that if you think Obamacare is a takeover by the federal government, this Common Core takeover will be worse than Obamacare as far as the federal government controlling our society, who we are and what we’re supposed to know.” Republican State Rep. Rebecca Kubacki, District 22, spoke briefly about how she votes on educational issues as a state legislator. She stated she talks to the experts – such as superintendents and teachers – before voting and decides how to vote based on what they tell her, as she can’t be an expert on every issue. So she encouraged the public to talk to their local school officials about their education concerns so they can relay them to her. “It’s the responsibility of the parents to go to the school, not the legislators, go to your local schools, go to your local principals, go to your local superintendents, go to the local school boards, say, ‘This is how I feel,’” Kubacki said. “It’s your responsibility – if you want to talk about local – that’s exactly what it means. It’s a local issue. If you have an issue with the curriculum, the books, any of that sort, it’s the responsibility of the parents to go to the schools and say, ‘We don’t like what’s happening.’” She also stated she will vote in the best interest of the kids. Speaking on the English/language arts portion of the Common Core was Dr. Terrence Moore, Angola, who works in the history department at Hillsdale College, ran a K-12 charter school in Colorado, and now travels the country setting up classical charter schools as part of his job at Hillsdale. “The main thing I have to do in training teachers who have been in the public school establishment is to think about how to undo all the things that they got in their training. The training that doesn’t prepare them how to teach students in the right way in math, in grammar, what have you,” Moore stated. He talked about how the parents and grandparents of those at the panel meeting probably got a better education than the education today because they had to know who all the U.S. presidents were, geography and maybe even Latin and grammar. Students today – and maybe even their teachers – may not know that information. “What’s going on with the Common Core right now is ‘Progressive Education,’ marching under a new banner, but a lot of it is the same old stuff,” Moore said. “Some of it is worse. And it’s so egregious worse that we’re waking up and realizing it, but many of the things going on with Common Core have been going on for a long time. And that’s why we had our guard down in 2010. Nobody recognized these standards as being anything different or bad. And the people that actually recognized the most are the people that had their students in Catholic or private schools... All of a sudden math has changed. A new way of teaching math. That’s what shocked people. That’s what got this ball rolling.” He commented that one of the problems with the idea that local control is the solution is that there is no local control over how a teacher is trained. A teacher has to have a certain education and certification from the state to be a teacher, and that’s not local control. Sticking with the English standards, Moore said the standards get rid of story texts and replaces them with informational texts on subjects like healthcare. He said the standards has a long list of texts and suggested readings in its Appendix B, which doesn’t include any religiously inspired texts or anything from historical men like Benjamin Franklin. He talked awhile about what was in Appendix B and what wasn’t and how it all was an effort to control what’s taught in the classroom. Erin Tuttle, Truth in American Education, Indianapolis, focused on the math standards. She said the Standards were suppose to be fewer, clearer and deeper, but what they actually are is the opposite. They’re more strategies and instruction than standards, she stated. Before a period of questions and answers, Republican State Rep. Dave Wolkins, District 18, said he and Kruse were probably the most conservative members on the education committee. Saturday’s panel discussion was the most information he had heard on the Standards, he said.
