Washington's Superintendent of Public Instruction recently announced the formal adoption of the Common Core Standards intitiative for Washington state.  This intitiative, which will impose a common set of national standards defining what Washington's children are supposed to be able to know and do, has been forced upon Washington state through the auspices of the Race to the Top competition, for which the state received no money.  Last session policymakers in Olympia  failed to block this overreaching by the federal government.  

This is unfortunate, as officials sitting in Washington D.C., not Olympia, will certainly be working on completing the next steps of their plan to take more control over public education by requiring Washington's schools to adopt a federal curriculum based on these Common Core Standards, and throwing away the state's tests in favor of a federal test.  Good-bye Measures of Academic Progress and the High School Proficiency Test.  Hello untested, unfunded and unproved federal test.       

Below is a 4 minute video by the Heritage Foundation, which reveals that 151 federal education programs now control 1) teacher qualifications; 2) frequency of testing; and 3) food in cafeterias across the nation. These programs have increased costs, added bureaucracy and red tape, and foisted a variety of well-meaning but ill-advised initiatives on Washington state, including No Child Left Behind, Even Start, Striving Readers, Mentoring Programs, Character Education, the list goes on and on. 

These federal initiatives have the deleterious effect of reducing local accountability for school performance ("the feds made us do it"), stifling innovation, freezing in place an unacceptable status quo, ending local and state control of schooling, and imposing a one-size-fits-all model on America's students.  

Decentralizing public education by giving authentic control over their classrooms to local school principals and teachers is the way to improve schools---not these efforts to further centralize decision-making in Washington D.C.