

Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, addresses a crowd in 2012 in Chicago. (Charles Rex Arbogast/AP.)

The Chicago Teachers’ Union House of Delegates has passed a resolution opposing use of the Common Core State Standards in teaching and testing, and it plans to lobby the Illinois Board of Education to reverse approval of the Core and ask its parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, to consider it at its upcoming convention.

AFT President Randi Weingarten has been a longtime supporter of the standards, but she has called for revisions of the early childhood standards, calling them developmentally inappropriate, and has blasted the implementation of the initiative. She has also pushed for a delay in the use of new Core-aligned student standardized tests as part of the evaluation of teachers. The AFT, however, has over the last several years accepted millions of dollars in funding from the Gates Foundation to support the Core, though Weingarten recently announced that the AFT would no longer accept Gates money for its Innovation Fund in a bow to growing criticism of the standards initiative.

Chicago union President Karen Lewis said in a statement:

“I agree with educators and parents from across the country, the Common Core mandate represents an overreach of federal power into personal privacy as well as into state educational autonomy. Common Core eliminates creativity in the classroom and impedes collaboration. We also know that high-stakes standardized testing is designed to rank and sort our children and it contributes significantly to racial discrimination and the achievement gap among students in America’s schools.”

Illinois adopted the Common Core standards in 2010 and school districts in the state have since then been implementing them in classrooms. During that time, opposition to the Core has grown from all ends of the political spectrum. Some opponents say the standards themselves have problems, especially the ones for young children; other critics say the process by which the Core was written was flawed and the implementation in many places has so far been nothing short of a mess.

Here’s the official text of the resolution: