Students attending K-12 public schools in Tennessee are struggling to perform above average on national standardized tests. Partially adopted in 2010 and fully implemented by the 2013-14 school year, Common Core State Standards (CCSS) failed to produce the academic results expected. The Tennessee Department of Education and Governor Bill Haslam “rebranded” CCSS as Tennessee standards after the legislature passed a bill to repeal the Core in April 2015. “Common Core is as big a change in education as Obamacare is in health care, but unlike Obamacare it needed no votes in Congress to become national policy,” Joy Pullman, executive editor of The Federalist, wrote in her 2017 book, The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids. These controversial K-12 public education standards, “garnered practically no notice from the media before the Obama administration, in concert with largely unelected state bureaucrats and a shadow bureaucracy of private organizations, locked it in nationwide. That meant no public debate before the scheme was imposed upon a country supposedly run with the consent of the governed,” Pullman observed. Common Core State Standards were adopted in full or in part by the governments of 46 states beginning in 2009, the first…
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