Attend forum on Common Core

 From the beginning of public instruction, education has been a state right, with parents exerting considerable control over their children’s education at the local school board level. That is all about to change radically in the 2014 school year.

A group of book publishers, federal government bureaucrats, trade associations, “centrally planned education” academicians and a handful of America’s largest corporations such as Microsoft have come up with a one-size-fits-all national education standard.

That standard is called Common Core, and it is copyrighted by a nonprofit corporation controlled by two trade associations, not by a democratically elected representative body.

This federalized one-for-all standard will be imposed on Detroit schools, where the reading proficiency is 7 percent and math proficiency is 4 percent, and simultaneously on our children in Conejo Valley, who have among the best reading and math proficiency in the nation. Is that going to work for the CVUSD parents and teachers?

Under Common Core, parents in the Conejo Valley will no longer be able to partner with their local schools to tailor their children’s education, nor with the state Department of Education for that matter. Under Common Core, the federalized standard may not be amended in any way except for a theoretical 15 percent.

However, the cost of modifying the standard by 15 percent will be so costly that no state will even consider it.

Regardless, some parents may be willing to trade their parental rights and local control of education for the claimed advantages of an untested federalized educational standard.

To give the parents an opportunity to decide for themselves, Conejo Valley Unified School District Superintendent Jeff Baarstad and Concerned Parents of Conejo Valley, led by myself, have agreed to hold a districtwide informational forum.