Heritage Puts Out Memo Highlighting Common Core Issues
Heritage held a panel and put out a memo on exiting the Common Core. It was a great panel featuring Jim Stergios from the Pioneer Institute, Williamson Evers of the Hoover Institute, Kent Talbert, former acting secretary at the US Department of Education, and Theodore Rebarber of AccountabilityWorks. As always, Heritage resources are succinct and useful. Watching the hour-long panel is also rewarding:
When “states signed on to common core standards, they did not realize…that they were transferring control of the school curriculum to the federal government,” said Sandra Stotsky, 21st Century Chair in Teacher Quality at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform, speaking at The Heritage Foundation on Tuesday.
Stotsky and four other education scholars from around the nation met to discuss the Obama Administration’s growing push for Common Core national education standards and why states
Hoover Institute Fellow Frames RTTT Fight in Federalism Context
Hoover Institute Fellow David Davenport frames the Race to the Top battle in a larger federalism context in a Forbes article:
You may wonder, for example, how K-12 education, a classic state and local policy matter, has become federalized through “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” reform programs. The answer is: through the Congressional spending power. The feds, in effect, bribe states to follow their ideas about education reform by putting out precious grant money to cash-starved states and school districts. As some of the justices asked in oral argument, how could states not feel “coerced” to follow federal rules at the risk of losing the largest grant program they now receive from Washington?
Tallying our inventory of federal challenges to state power, so far we have the most important commerce clause litigation since the New Deal, and the largest case questioning possible federal coercion of states in 25 years. Then comes the Arizona immigration case, in which the federal government has deployed its preemption power in an attempt to stop Arizona from increasing enforcement against illegal immigration, an area in which the federal government has taken the