Resolve the real issues

Our governor has finally gone too far.

In just a matter of days Louisiana lawmakers will convene in Baton Rouge to begin hammering out the details for achieving a balanced budget that will meet all the needs of our financially strapped state. It won’t be easy and might just be impossible without significant pain from massive cuts to public services like higher education and health care.

So what does Gov. Bobby Jindal do to make sure they are focused on this very important task? Announce a plan to push legislation during the session that starts on April 13 that would get Common Core State Standards out of Louisiana. Wow, what a way to cloud (and we might add distract) a session of the Legislature.

Every year since the state adopted Common Core State Standards conservative state legislators have repeatedly attempted to pass bills that would stop it. And every year, the measures fail to make it out of the education committee due to lack of support. So the move at this point by Jindal kind of reminds us of the repeated attempts by Republicans in Congress to pass legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It won’t work, and it’s obviously nothing more than a political ploy to gain points with conservative voters. The plan itself has no merit in regards to real education.

It’s illogical because key to Jindal’s proposal is for the state to do a little time traveling. Yes, he’s suggesting we immediately dump all the work our state school systems have been doing for the last five years and replace it with the 2004-05 Grade Level Expectations using LEAP and iLEAP testing. Really? Ten years ago we were writing about our children who could not read on grade level and who were absolutely doomed to repeat the cycles of poverty and ignorance that have plagued our state for decades.

Obviously, that is not the answer. And we desperately hope our legislators are not held captive enough by the governor in this upcoming session to scrap Common Core in return for local projects or other political perks.

We are asking lawmakers to pause and think about the children. Think about our educators. Think about the chaos the governor’s plan proposes to rain down upon our state’s education system. In his announcement of his plan, the governor suggests this notion of going backward with our grade level expectations will bring clarity for teachers. We ask how? Teachers likely to be familiar with the 2004-05 Grade Level Expectations are most probably retired by now.

Jindal’s plan also addresses how state education standards are formulated. Again, what he is proposing would create a situation far worse than what’s currently in place. In Jindal’s plan the final decision on standards will be completely politicized. While state educators (teachers, etc.), including the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, would be responsible for drafting the standards, the final decision on them would rest upon a majority vote of both houses of the Legislature. It is an attempt to almost completely gut the authority Louisiana voters have given to the state’s education board.

What the governor seeks doesn’t make sense. In Louisiana we’ve got real issues in need of legislative resolution; Common Core is simply not one of them.

The editorials in this column represent the opinions of The News-Star's editorial board, composed of General Manager and Executive Editor Kathy Spurlock, Business and Politics Reporter Greg Hilburn and Education Reporter Barbara Leader.