Common Core Compromise Would Water Down Controversial Education Standards in S.C

Education Candidates Weigh In on Senate Bill

Republican members of the Senate Education Committee had hoped to appease very vocal conservative activists, who are demanding immediate repeal of the Common Core K-12 Academic Standards, without upending the coming school year, given that school districts have already devoted considerable resources to implementing them.

Interestingly, the now-gutted bill is raising those compromise-averse activists’ hopes if not drawing their support.

S. 300, authored by Sen. Larry Grooms (R-Berkeley), began as a ban on Common Core, plain and simple. Now, to avoid wasting the aforementioned resources and inflicting chaos on classrooms already entrenched in Common Core, the bill is a thoroughly amended phasing-out.

Because the current version of S. 300 hadn’t been made public yet, a staff member of the Senate Education Committee walked Free Times through the compromise. The first section prohibits South Carolina from sending individual student data to Washington, D.C., a concern that the staffer said “we heard buckets about” but that an education policy expert described as a bugaboo, saying, “We never have nor never intended to send student-level data to D.C. under any scenario.”

The second major provision adopts the gist of a separate piece of legislation also provoked by Common Core, S. 888 by Sen. Chip Campsen (R-Charleston), which requires that any academic standards not developed by the S.C. Department of Education be approved by the General Assembly.

The bill goes on to withdraw South Carolina from the Smarter Balance testing consortium, a group promoted by the Obama administration, and do away with high school exit exams beginning with 2015’s graduates. There is also language that will allow past graduates who did not receive diplomas because they flunked the exams to petition their old school districts for diplomas up until Dec. 21, 2015. This testing stuff is relevant because it’s how states participating in Common Core, of which South Carolina is one of 45, had agreed to evaluate their efforts.


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