Analysis: Dispute over Common Core gets personal
By MELINDA DESLATTE, Associated Press
Updated 2:03 pm, Sunday, August 3, 2014
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The clash over whether Louisiana's public schools should teach to the Common Core education standards has devolved into a bitter public feud that will have one-time political friends sitting on opposite sides of courtrooms.
Dueling lawsuits have been filed. An ethics complaint is in the works. Contracts are being audited. Accusations have been lodged of illegal behavior, ethical impropriety and political pandering.
And while the attacks grow more personal, major questions about the educational path of the state's public schools remain unanswered with students returning to classrooms in the next two weeks.
The upheaval started in June, when Gov. Bobby Jindal issued executive orders seeking to undermine use of Common Core and its associated testing.
The Common Core standards are grade-by-grade benchmarks of what students should learn in English and math. They have been adopted by more than 40 states and were once championed by Louisiana's Republican governor.
Supporters of the standards praise them as a better method for preparing students for college and careers after high school. Critics say the standards are untested, raise privacy concerns about data-sharing and damage state autonomy.
Jindal now opposes Common Core as a federal intrusion into local education, echoing the concerns raised by tea party groups around the nation.
But while the governor changed his mind on the standards, a majority of members of theBoard of Elementary and Secondary Education, or BESE, still support Common Core, along with Jindal's hand-picked state education superintendent, John White.
State lawmakers also refused to jettison Louisiana's use of the standards earlier this year.
When Jindal suspended the testing contracts, he said the education department didn't follow state procurement law and needed to seek competitive bids for the work. But he also said the move would help to get "Louisiana out of the Common Core."
White and BESE President Chas Roemer said the governor overstepped his legal authority.
Roemer accused Jindal of trying to govern by executive fiat and of changing his position on Analysis: Dispute over Common Core gets personal - SFGate: