Business Insider reports that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) has promised that his state will abandon the nationalized Common Core standards, even though some state lawmakers and education officials are challenging his decision.
Jindal issued a series of executive orders which require Louisiana to end its relationship with the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), its Common Core test consortium, and to develop its own standards and tests.
“The federal government would like to assert control of our educational system and rush implementation of a one-size-fits-all set of standards that raises a lot of serious concerns,” Jindal said at a news conference on Wednesday. “We’re very alarmed about choice and local control over curriculum being taken away from our parents and from our educators.”
The governor said the overreach of the federal government in the Common Core standards initiative is a violation of the Tenth Amendment, which defines the powers of the federal and state governments.
“If other states want to give up their 10th Amendment rights, that’s fine,” Jindal said. “We’re not doing that in Louisiana.”
Jindal, who once supported the Common Core, recently vetoed a bill that would have further bound his state to the controversial standards and the PARCC assessments.
State Superintendent of Education John White and Chas Roemer, BESE president, both of whom are ardent supporters of the nationalized standards, held a media briefing immediately after Jindal’s press conference. In that briefing, they repeated the words of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who said Tuesday that Jindal’s turnabout on Common Core was motivated by “politics.”