Activist Post

The federal education standard known as Common Core has been essentially bribed into school districts with very little local debate.

Now as more parents and localities begin to take a deeper look at this curriculum, they’re finding a multitude of inadequacies which appear to be agenda-driven and standard-lowering.

Until today resistance to Common Core has been small and relatively silent, but Indiana just became the first state to formally discard Common Core standards when their State Board of Education voted 10-1 to endorse a replacement standard.

The Associated Press reports:

One of the first states to adopt Common Core standards became the first state to formally abandon the national benchmarks, as Indiana’s State Board of Education voted overwhelmingly Monday for a replacement that will guide student learning for years.

The board voted 10-1 to endorse the new benchmarks to guide what students in kindergarten through 12th grade should learn in math and English, which were created by a panel of faculty from Indiana universities and representatives from science and technology industries. The vote came ahead of the state’s July deadline and could end months of heated debate. “I hope that with this conversation behind us, we can stick with these standards and make sure we’re not continually moving the goal posts on our students and educators,” board member at-large Gordon Hendry said. “The reasons academic standards have been successful in places like Massachusetts is because legislators and policymakers picked a direction and stayed with it.” Indiana adopted Common Core in 2010 along with 44 other states. But states’ rights advocates and tea party members later vocally opposed the Common Core standards, saying they were created without adequate local input.

The new benchmarks, however, are also under scrutiny as the activist group Hoosiers Against Common Core warned that the replacement is just a “rebranded” version of Common Core.

Indeed, the South Bend Superintendent of Schools said the new standards are “very, very, much aligned” with Common Core: