Michigan: Common Core State Standards Legislation (Update: Detroit Free Press Editorial)

Detroit Free Press Editorial

Indulging the fringe while our state’s students fall behind

   Three years ago, Michigan’s bipartisan state Board of Education adopted an ambitious set of learning goals known as Common Core. Promulgated by a bipartisan group of governors and educators led by Georgia Republican Sonny Perdue, Common Core spells out the math and language skills K-12 students need to succeed in college and the globally competitive workplace that awaits them after graduation.

   The Common Core’s language arts standards, for example, assert that, by the end of eighth grade, students should be able to write an essay that includes “a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented.”

   The math standards suggest that students preparing to enter fifth grade should know how to use addition, subtraction, multiplication and division “to solve word problems involving distances, intervals of time, liquid volumes, masses of objects and money.”

   Straightforward and anodyne, the Common Core standards are nevertheless more rigorous than those currently in place in many Michigan public schools. And in a state governed by responsible adults, Michigan educators would be hard at work, like their counterparts in the 44 other states that have adopted the Common Core, on developing curricula and teaching strategies designed to help students meet the new standards.

   But responsible adults were in the minority earlier this year when the Republican-led state Legislature abruptly blocked funding to implement the Common Core standards, which are endorsed by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and former Republican Gov. John Engler.

   And this week, while educators elsewhere move toward implementation, a subcommittee led by state Rep. Tom McMillin, R-Rochester Hills, began a series of hearings to consider the concerns articulated by tea party critics like Glenn Beck, who has suggested that the Common Core standards are the leading edge of a conspiracy to federalize public education that will lead to iris scans, brain imaging and other intrusions into student privacy.

   McMillin is a zealot whose paranoiac opposition to Common Core has made him a favorite of the Republican fringe. But he couldn’t have gotten this far without the craven acquiescence of House Speaker Jase Bolger, R-Marshall, and Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville, R-Monroe, who green-lighted McMillin’s witch hunt over the protests of Snyder and Superintendent of Schools Mike Flanagan.

   It’s another instance of so-called adults subordinating the interests of children to their own political gamesmanship. If there are substantive objections to the Common Core, where have Republican critics been for the last three years while responsible members of their party were earnestly drafting the standards? What have they to offer now except baseless assertions of a United Nations-led conspiracy to subvert local control? And should a high school diploma really signify less in Marshall or Monroe or Rochester Hills than it signifies in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts or Iowa?

   As it stands now, Michigan school districts have spent more than a year developing teaching plans that sync with new assessment tools based on Common Core. In a worst-case scenario, continued legislative dithering will leave students and teachers in limbo between those new learning goals and the MEAP standards they were supposed to replace a year from September.

   Michigan cannot indulge such pointless posturing. Tell state legislators it’s time to embrace Common Core before our state’s students fall any further behind their peers in rest of the United States.

TAKE ACTION

   Tell your legislators to accept Common Core standards.

   › Go to http://bit.ly  /findmirep   to find your state representative.

   › Go to http://bit.ly  /findmisen   to find your state senator.