[Below is an excerpt of School Reform News Managing Editor, Joy Pullmann’s July 22, 2013 testimony before the Arkansas Legislature in opposition to the Common Core Education Standards. For the full testimony, please click on the PDF link above.]
“Common Core will affect nearly everything about Arkansas education. It demands new textbooks and learning materials, new tests, teacher retraining, teacher prep overhaul, and new technology and infrastructure because Common Core national tests must be online-only by 2017-2018. Despite this drastic influence, Arkansas legislators, who are expected to appropriate money for all these changes, had no opportunity to review Common Core or conduct a cost analysis for how much more money hard-working taxpayers must sacrifice from their pockets to pay for the dreams of Washington, DC-based bureaucrats. An estimate by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, funded by Common Core’s main financial backer, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, puts the costs at between $38 for the “bare bones” approach and $153 million for the “business as usual” approach, and pegs current spending on such projects in Arkansas at $47.5 million. An independent estimate from the consulting firm AccountabilityWorks puts Arkansas’ phase-in costs at approximately $240 million over seven years.”
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.
