By Alan Smithee
Last week the National PTA released a statement endorsing the Common Core State Standards, which are standards developed by 48 states and the District of Columbia for teaching math and language to students in grades K-12. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal the standard is a blueprint for education, it “doesn’t tell teachers exactly what to teach or how to teach but lays out broad goals for student achievement.”
The Journal articles states that if these documents are adopted they “could trigger wide-scale changes to state tests, textbooks and teacher-education programs nationwide.” Well, not quite nationwide. Care to guess which two states are holding out?
If you guessed the Christian Republic of Texas and the experiment in government subsidized living that is Alaska you are right. It seems that Rick Perry feels that states voluntarily getting together to determine that kindergarteners should learn to count to 100 by tens or eighth graders should be able to recognize an author’s point of view is a violation of state soverignty.
We have reported before about the asinine shit that the Texas State Board of Education is doing to education standards. However, we left out the fact that, for decades, Texas has an outsized influence on the textbook market.
This has other states worrying that our ‘triangle trade curriculum’ might infringe upon their sovereignty. Which is something that Rick Perry, who is all about protecting state sovereignty, has yet to comment on.
It seems odd that a governor who is reportedly working on a book about state sovereignty and who believes in protecting schools from unwarranted intrustion, Perry cites federal intrustion, but I’m pretty sure that intrusion by another state is also on his list of things he does not want, is ok with Texas setting the curriculum for much of the nation.
Fortunately, the ideologically influenced textbooks that will be ruining Texas children for the foreseeable future may not be damaging young minds throughout the rest of the country.
