Citizens must take back local school control

Citizens must take back local school control

The year 2015 witnessed an unprecedented erosion of local control and parental involvement in education, which resulted from the rollout of the increasingly maligned Common Core State Standards. The controversial initiative was driven not by local and state experts, but by two deceptively named trade organizations, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, that purport to advance college and career readiness in education policy.

These math and English Language Arts educational standards, which are now rejected by a majority of Americans, according to recent polling, have drawn the ire from a spectrum so broad that it unites teachers’ unions and the tea party. The standards have been lambasted by educators, administrators and psychologists alike as developmentally inappropriate, given their emphasis on didactic instruction in early childhood education, the excessive screen time that their utilization of e-learning entails, their failure to include a holistic study of classic literature and their infringement upon classroom autonomy through the required teaching of certain content, which is enforced by way of high-stakes standardized testing.

Though it has become evident that the standards themselves are problematic (and that they aren’t “just standards” since standards drive assessments, which shape the development of curricula, thereby subverting local control), their implementation has proven equally troublesome. Notwithstanding claims that the standards’ adoption was state-led, proponents neglect to mention that states were effectively bribed into adopting the standards with Race to the Top (RttT) grant money, and that RttT (of which Ohio is a part) also requires excessive testing, the high stakes evaluation of teachers by student test scores, and the intrusive, longitudinal mining of personally identifiable student data. All facts considered, it is fair to say that government overreach and the influence of crony, private interests have undermined local control of education in recent years.

The outset of 2016 finds the citizens of Ohio in no different state. Common Core is still in place despite the arbitrary shifting of testing consortia, and the recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which was touted by its sponsors as a win for local control and which allegedly replaces No Child Left Behind, further diminishes local control through its assault on the ability of students to opt out of standardized assessments, its use of RttT-style, strings-attached block granting, and its expansion of the education secretary’s powers such that he can veto non-rigorous standards, the result of which, according to USDOE’s outgoing assistant communications secretary, Peter Cunningham, is an effective Common Core mandate.

As parents and concerned citizens, the time has come for us to stand against these and other subversions of local control by the crony partnership of government and corporate interests and to reclaim oversight of the education of our children. Let us, the citizens of Cincinnati, lead this charge in the New Year.