HuffPo: 'Jindal Announces Huge Common Core Shift'

The Huffington Post reports that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) had announced a “huge Common Core shift” by stating that he would no longer be “bullied by the federal government.”

On Wednesday Jindal issued a series of executive orders calling for his state to exit the Partnership of Assessments for College and Career Readiness (PARCC), its Common Core test consortium, and for Louisiana to develop its own standards and tests.

“We won’t let the federal government take over Louisiana’s education standards,” Jindal said at a press conference. “We’re very alarmed about choice and local control over curriculum being taken away from parents and educators.”

Emmett McGroarty, education director of the American Principles project said, in a statement:

Today, the Governor stands alongside the moms, dads, and other citizens of Louisiana who are pushing back against the federal overreach. In so doing, he has reaffirmed the Framers’ intent that state government will guard the rightful interests of the state’s citizens.

Louisiana state superintendent John White, however, is challenging Jindal on his decision.

“It is outside the bounds of both our state’s laws and our state’s aspirations for its children to think that we would turn back now,” White said in a statement.

“The laws of our state…give the statutory authority for approving tests and standards to the state Board [of Education], not to the governor,” White told the Huffington Post.

Referring to Jindal’s decision as a “serious last-minute proposal,” White said that, despite Jindal’s executive orders, he plans to move ahead with Common Core in Louisiana.

Laura Slover, CEO of PARCC, maintains that Jindal cannot remove his state from the consortium without White’s cooperation. She stated that, since, when Jindal approved of the Common Core standards in 2010, he signed the Memorandum of Understanding for PARCC, it was “clear that withdrawal requires the agreement of the same three signatories or their successors, so that no one individual can unilaterally decide the fate of a state’s standards and assessments.”

White and Chas Roemer, president of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), are both ardent supporters of the nationalized standards. Slover said that since the two “have made clear that they intend for Louisiana to stay the course” and remain in PARCC, the consortium will continue its relationship with Louisiana.