NO: A growing consensus of leaders finds fault with nationalized school standards

It was truly encouraging for teachers to read in this newspaper that they have something in common with Hawaii’s three leading gubernatorial candidates and their concerns over the highly controversial Common Core national educational standards.

Democrat David Ige, Republican James "Duke" Aiona and Independent Mufi Hannemann were critical of the imposition of standards said by Common Core creators to be more rigorous, and therefore would help better prepare kindergarten through 12th-grade students for college upon graduation.

Hawaii joined 46 states in adopting the math and English standards, after a hardly-subtle push from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. President Barack Obama’s education chief threatened to cut off federal education funds from states that did not adopt Common Core and the standardized testing that comes with it.

However, three states — Indiana, Oklahoma and South Dakota — have withdrawn from Common Core. Others, including Colorado and Washington, are considering alternatives. Legislators in Washington opted out of requiring standardized testing based on Common Core.

A national PDK/Gallup poll has 59 percent of respondents opposed who knew what Common Core was, primarily because they feared that teachers would no longer have the flexibility to teach what they deemed was right for their students.

So Hawaii’s gubernatorial candidates were not alone in their concerns regarding Common Core. In fact, in Hawaii, it would seem that support for the new standards have been common only to the top brass at the state Department of Education, as well as a consortium of corporate types advocating lock-step approaches to educating the nation’s youth.

Hawaii’s public school teachers certainly are not convinced that state Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi and crew are on the right track when requiring that all public school students be subjected to Common Core standardized testing. And if the students do not fare well on the tests, neither will the teachers, whose evaluations hinge in part on test scores.

Ironically, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a principal force behind Common Core, has recommended that states hold off a year or more on rating students or teachers using Common Core test scores, maintaining that many districts were ill-prepared to teach along Common Core lines, not to mention test on the standards. Yet our DOE has thus far disregarded the warning, despite the fact that their own projections have standardized test scores dropping as they reflect the new standards. In other words, we have been set up to fail.

Apparently, this is not lost on the gubernatorial candidates. Ige, a Democrat whose wife is a vice principal at Kanoelani Elementary School, was quoted as saying, "With all the different things that have been going on in the department, implementation, training — all the kinds of things that you believe should happen in order to allow for a smooth implementation and transition — really a lot of those components have just been lacking."

Former Lt. Gov. Aiona, a Republican who is a substitute teacher at public schools, said principals and teachers should be able to develop a curriculum that best fits their schools.

"Common Core is something that goes across the board," he said. "And one of the biggest complaints I’ve heard from teachers and principals — I wouldn’t say it’s unanimous, but I think it’s the consensus — they’re not happy with Common Core."

Former Honolulu Mayor Hannemann said that he does not agree that Hawaii should adhere to Common Core because it "flies in the heart" of decentralizing decision-making at public schools.

DOE’s recalcitrance when it comes to refraining from rolling out Common Core and attendant testing demonstrates that the bureaucracy will resist decentralizing. It remains to be seen if the victor in the election this November has something to say about that.