Illinois Rep. Randy Hultgren is one of the 43 cosponsors of a House resolution condemning the Obama administration’s entanglement in national Common Core K-12 mandates.
House Resolution 476, a companion to Senate Resolution 345, condemns the federal government for coercing states into adopting the curriculum and testing mandates.
“Common Core is not the state-led effort it was advertised as,” he says. “Ultimately, the Common Core threatens the control of local communities and parents over their children’s education.”
Hultgren supports education standards themselves, but not Common Core, particularly the way the federal government has used it to push states into a nationalized education system.
Common Core was originally conceived by private organizations “but has transformed into an incentives-based mandate from the Federal Government,” the resolution says.
Federal law prohibits establishing national testing and national student databases, the resolution notes. It then lays out the myriad ways the Obama administration has transgressed such prohibitions and pushed Common Core on states.
Joy Pullmann is a research fellow on education policy for The Heartland Institute and managing editor of The Federalist, a web magazine on politics, policy, and culture.
