Santa Fe, NM – Pointing to broad bipartisan support for repeal of Common Core academic standards across the nation, Senator Linda Lopez (D-11-Bernalillio) today pushed for passage of Senate Bill 196 (SB 196) in the Senate Education Committee (SEC). Sen. Lopez, sponsor of SB 196, said Common Core harms children’s learning experience and fails to meet New Mexico’s educational needs. The bill, which was temporarily tabled by SEC, would halt implementation of the Common Core standards in all New Mexico public schools, K-12 in any subject area until the Public Education Department (PED) conducts public hearings across the state to explain its decision to support the standards, and provides analysis.
“Common Core is a disaster for our children and for the future of public education in New Mexico,” Sen. Lopez said. “The Governor and PED have done a grave disservice to students by taking Common Core on board. Repeal is not a Democratic or Republican position. There is strong bipartisan support everywhere you look in the United States for pulling back these bad standards for our classrooms. Repeal of Common Core is important for our children and for their ability to learn to think critically and on their feet. I call on legislators from both parties to join me in putting an end to this failed policy. It is one thing we can all agree on in this session.”
To demonstrate the significant opposition to the academic standards, Sen. Lopez pointed to a strongly-worded letter signed by more than 130 distinguished Catholic scholars around the country last year to U.S. Catholic bishops that denounces the Common Core standards as “a recipe for standardized workforce preparation.” The scholars wrote that Common Core will fail to prepare students for successful college education, and that it does “a grave disservice to Catholic education.” The letter urges the bishops to ignore the standards or, in the more than 100 dioceses that have already adopted them, to abandon them. The letter also states that the standards are “contrary to tradition and academic studies on reading and human formation,” and says proponents seek to “transform ‘literacy’ into a ‘critical’ skill set, at the expense of sustained and heartfelt encounters with great works of literature.”
The huge American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union in Chicago strongly opposes Common Core. A resolution the union passed says that the standard “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.”
The Republican think-tank Heartland Institute calls Common Core a “Washington-led scheme to take away the long-held control of curriculum from states, school boards, teachers, and parents. The program represents a major centralization of control over curriculum, contrary to the American tradition of decentralized control and funding. Instead of being ‘world class,’ the standards represent a significant step back from what experts say are the standards America really needs.” Even the National Republican Committee in Washington D.C. has passed a strongly-worded resolution blasting Common Core.
Bills to repeal Common Core have been introduced in 19 states this year, including SB 196 in New Mexico. Some of these states are majority Democratic, such as Washington State, and some are Republican.
A related bill sponsored by Sen. Lopez, SB 138 to repeal the A-F School Rating Act, a key federal “Race to the Top” measure and Martinez Administration policy, passed last week in the Senate Education Committee 4-2.
“Policies coming from Washington, such as the A-F Rating system, are holding New Mexico hostage, dangling funding in return for us giving up all local control of our educational policies,” Sen. Lopez said. “We need to reinvigorate the federalism that once enabled states to create top quality public education systems, and chart their own way. Cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all policies are wrong for New Mexico.”