States

Utah Has ‘Complete Control’ Over Standards, State Supe Tells Duncan

By Catherine Gewertz — March 06, 2012 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Another chapter in Utah’s anti-common-core rumblings: state schools superintendent Larry Shumway wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan asserting the state’s “complete control” over the common standards that it adopted.

The letter, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, also says that Utah can choose at any time to drop out of the consortium that is designing tests for the common standards. None of this, however, should detract from Utah’s request for a waiver from key requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, Shumway reportedly said in the letter.

Shumway’s letter apparently didn’t go far enough to mollify Utah’s most vigorous common-core opponents, who would like to see the whole thing scotched. Meanwhile, as we told you recently, two measures that capture some of state lawmakers’ skepticism about the standards are making their way through the state senate.

The discontent in Utah, and also in South Carolina, as we’ve reported to you, sparked a post last week by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Chester E. Finn Jr. Finn, a common-core proponent (though not without his own questions and criticisms), examines the most popular objections to the standards, and advances the idea that the whole shebang could collapse in large part because of actions and statements by the federal government.

Related Tags:

A version of this news article first appeared in the Curriculum Matters blog.