In a piece at Townhall, Maggie Gallagher discusses Sarah Palin’s prescience in instinctively opposing Obama’s federal education mandates as an encroachment on state sovereignty before it was fashionable to do so:
Sarah Palin was the first to recognize the problem: By participating in President Obama’s signature education initiative, the Common Core Standards, Alaska would lose control over its own curriculum.
On May 31, 2009, then-Gov. Palin announced Alaska would adopt a “watch and wait” attitude:
“If this initiative produces useful results, Alaska will remain free to incorporate them,” Gov. Palin said, adding that “high expectations are not always created by new, mandated federal standards written on paper. They are created in the home, the community and the classroom.”
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, to his credit, was the next to recognize a federal boondoggle when he saw one: “I will not commit Texas taxpayers to unfunded federal obligations or to the adoption of unproven, cost-prohibitive national standards and tests,” Gov. Perry wrote in a Jan. 13, 2010, letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
In the ensuing two years, it’s become clear that Perry and Palin — two core conservative figures whose intelligence is routinely mocked by liberal “sophisticates” — were brilliantly prescient, indeed prophetic.
Common Core Standards turn out to be like Obamacare — you don’t really know what’s in it until after you pass it and are mired in its tentacles.
Today, even more states are waking up to discover that they have lost control of both curriculum and costs for a program that is untested and unlikely to improve student performance. A February study by the Pioneer Institute conservatively estimates that Obama’s Common Core Standards will costs the states at least $16 billion — money that could be used to promote education in other ways (pioneerinstitute.org/pdf/120222_CCSSICost.pdf).
You can read Gallagher entire piece here.
