Republican lawmakers in the Statehouse continue to make election-year hay from a bill that would repeal the Common Core education standards in Ohio. The measure’s sponsors at least have shown enough respect for Ohio students to remove a provision that would have allowed the teaching of creationism — that is, religion in the guise of science — in the state’s public schools.
But the bill before the state House remains bad business. It needs to die in the General Assembly — or, if it gets that far, to be vetoed by Gov. John Kasich.
To repeat: Common Core’s national standards are not a curriculum. They do not, and under state law cannot, dictate to any Ohio school what it must teach. They simply define what students in every grade should be expected to achieve in math and English. They stress reading, writing, and critical thinking.
The standards do not amount to a federal takeover of education, because they are not a federal mandate. Washington gives states money to maintain the standards and to develop tests pegged to them. That’s all.
Instead, the standards were drafted by state governors and schools superintendents of both parties, informed by teachers’ suggestions, endorsed by private employers across the country, and adopted voluntarily and legally by 45 states (a handful of states have since eliminated them).
The standards remain an effective vehicle for educational reform. Abandoning them now would waste four years of effort — and millions of dollars — expended to bring them to Ohio classrooms starting this school year. That’s an oddly profligate stance for self-described fiscally conservative lawmakers to take.
Common Core does not require political or ideological indoctrination of students, or secret and intrusive data collection, or other tinfoil-hat myths peddled by extremist critics and opportunistic politicians. What it will do is help students perform better in the classroom, preparing them for higher education and the workplace and strengthening Ohio’s economy and global competitiveness.
Still, attacks on Common Core remain an effective way for Republicans to pander to a far-right base of voting support. Ohio House Republicans were spooked when one of their colleagues lost his re-election bid to a Common Core opponent in this year’s primary election.
The bill’s advocates seek to replace Common Core in Ohio, for now, with a politically worked-over version of standards that Massachusetts developed and then dropped when that state adopted Common Core. Repeal backers want Ohio to create its own standards within four years, but are vague about what they ought to include.
To their credit, some GOP lawmakers and business executives are defending Common Core and challenging the proposed repeal. State Sen. Peggy Lehner (R., Kettering), who chairs the Senate Education Committee, recently referred to House hearings on the repeal bill as the “circus in Columbus.”
House GOP leaders are manipulating the chamber’s rules to keep the repeal bill out of the House Education Committee, which includes a number of Republican advocates of Common Core. At a hearing on the bill, an exasperated official of the Columbus Chamber of Commerce, Michael Hartley, implored the measure’s sponsors to allow Ohio to “stop spinning our damn wheels.”
Such pushback likely caused the bill’s authors to delete a provision last week that would have prohibited “political or religious interpretation of scientific facts in favor of another [sic]” — a coded green light for instruction in creationism and so-called intelligent design in science classes. New language calls for “review, in an objective manner, [of] the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories” — a less blatant attack on evolution, but still mischievous.
Mr. Kasich could close this sideshow by saying now, as he has said before, that he will veto a legislative effort to repeal Common Core. Why isn’t he doing so?
First Published September 8, 2014, 4:00 a.m.
