Despite Setback, Jindal Continues Opposition to Common Core

Although a Louisiana judge overturned Bobby Jindal’s suspension of the Common Core standards Tuesday, the Pelican State governor’s chief of staff said Jindal will appeal.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia)

NEW ORLEANS — Although Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s battle against Common Core education state standards lost ground with Tuesday’s court ruling lifting his suspension on the standards, Anna Arthurs, a founder of Louisiana Catholics for Excellence in Education, thinks the Republican governor’s recent actions blocking the norms will help Catholic parents who oppose them.

“We needed that support,” said Arthurs, a Thibodaux, La., physician and mother of four. “We needed someone to stand up and state what we have said all along about Common Core. Gov. Jindal validated us and re-ignited our movement.”

She hopes diocesan officials are paying attention to what the governor is doing.

Jindal, who originally supported Common Core State Standards, issued several executive orders this spring halting Common Core testing in Louisiana.

The state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) responded by joining a group of charter-school parents in New Orleans in suing the governor. It is but one of several state suits related to Common Core. On Aug. 15, a judge denied a lawsuit by 17 state legislators aimed at stopping Common Core, and the controversial standards will be in effect this year.

And on Aug. 19, state Judge Todd Hernandez lifted the governor's suspensions, saying Jindal’s actions were harmful to parents, teachers and students. Hernandez ruled the Jindal administration didn’t produce any evidence to support the governor’s claims that Education Superintendent John White and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education violated state contracting law.

Kyle Plotkin, Jindal’s chief of staff, said the governor will appeal Hernandez’s ruling, calling it “wrong on the facts and the law.”

Jindal, who is Catholic, is widely seen as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2016, and his reversal on Common Core has been chalked up to political ambitions by some Common Core supporters.

Katie Branchard, a Metairie, La., mother who has three sons in Catholic schools, insists that even if the governor’s interventions are motivated by political ambition, they are welcome.

“The Catholic school my children go to was already a high-performing school,” Branchard said, “and I worry that it will be pulled down by Common Core standards.”

 

List of ‘Exemplars’

Branchard’s sons attend a Catholic school that began introducing Common Core elements last year. Common Core materials include a list of “exemplars” — or possible texts — that feature material, which, though optional, worry some Catholic parents. “Teachers aren’t always vigilant [about texts and other materials],” she said.

Several Catholic parents cited Common Core reading exemplars featuring non-traditional families as especially unsuitable in Catholic schools.

But the biggest problem so far at the school Branchard’s sons attend is not about reading choices. “Nobody knew what Common Core was,” she said, “until we started trying to help our children with math homework, and then there was an uproar.”

Branchard said children in elementary school were bringing home math homework with problems so baffling that “doctors and lawyers can’t understand them.”

Common Core relies less on computation and memorizing and more on word problems in elementary-school math than previous standard methods.

 

Hot-Button Issue

While Louisiana has been called ground zero in the Common Core fight, the battle remains a hot-button issue in Catholic schools throughout the nation.

Patrick Lofton, executive vice president of the National Catholic Education Association (NCEA) — which hasn’t endorsed Common Core but conducts workshops on how to adapt the standards for Catholic schools — said that “slightly more than 100” of the 176 U.S. dioceses have adopted or adapted Common Core standards.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Education, in April, put out a document entitled “Common Core Standards FAQs” that addressed the “growing concerns” about the applicability of the Common Core State Standards in Catholic schools. The bishops left the actual decision about whether to adapt Common Core to diocesan authorities but stressed that the “CCSS is of its nature incomplete as it pertains to the Catholic school.”

The Cardinal Newman Society, which has led the charge against Common Core, under the banner of a program called Catholic Is Our Core, hailed the bishops’ document as a turning point. Dan Guernsey, director of K-12 programs at the Cardinal Newman Society, said, in light of the USCCB’s document, “Catholic schools should either follow their own proven standards or they must clearly delineate what additional or changed standards they have introduced to the Common Core to make them sufficient for use in a Catholic school.

“Since the Common Core standards are untested,” Guernsey continued, “this second path is especially problematic.”

 

Development of the Child

Further complicating this second approach is that the Common Core standards, as they exist in the world of public education, are only focused on college and career readiness.

In contrast, Guernsey added, “Catholic schools focus on the development of the whole child and exist in a world oriented toward a particular understanding of truth, beauty and goodness and the intelligibility and meaning of God’s creation, including ourselves.”

According to the NCEA’s Lofton, “The bishops have come out with a statement, and it appears that maybe they were not as in favor of Common Core [as we might have hoped], but more than 100 dioceses have adopted or adapted it.”

He stressed both the importance of the USCCB’s guidance and the decision-making power of local dioceses, based on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which dictates that decisions related to social issues are better made on a local level.

Lofton said that the opposition to Common Core is “lessening,” but he admits that Common Core remains controversial.

 

Gates Foundation

The NCEA last year received a grant of slightly more than $100,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has also poured $150 million into work on the Common Core Standards. In November, De La Salle Christian Brother Robert Bimonte, president of NCEA, pointed out that a number of Catholic institutions have received Gates grants.

“A lot of dioceses are trying to engage in some level of conversation with people who are against Common Core,” Lofton said. The NCEA has conducted workshops for Catholic educators on how to adapt the new curriculum to a Catholic environment.

“Our Catholic schools have such a rich tradition of academic excellence,” Lofton told the Register. “I don’t think any diocese is going to risk that. The core foundation of Catholic education is not in jeopardy.”

Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati adapted the standards from the Ohio Common Core State Standards about three years ago. James Rigg, superintendent of Catholic schools in Cincinnati, said it is crucial to make the distinction between adopting and adapting the standards. He said that many of the complaints from parents are about specific texts and added, “We vet texts” before they are used in Catholic schools.

“Adopting the standards is not the same as adapting them,” said Rigg. “We studied them. We made them our own, and we made them better. We made them Catholic and put it to use for us, which is different from adopting the standards lock, stock and barrel.

“I say that because, recently, I’ve had calls from parents who say that adoption and adaption mean the same thing. There are very, very important differences there,” Rigg added.

 “Talking broadly, it is serving our students well. Our curriculum standards are appropriately rigorous. They reflect our faith and also reflect the needs of learners in the 21st century.”

 

State-Eligibility Tests

There is another incentive built into the adoption of the Common Core standards for Church-affiliated schools in Ohio and other states where Catholic schools take state-funded vouchers for low-income students.

The Catholic schools that participate in such voucher programs will have to pass state tests to remain eligible. These tests will be based on the Common Core curricula, and educators worry about the effect of sticking with more traditional methods of instruction.

Rigg previously told the Register that the Cincinnati Archdiocese “moved willingly” towards adapting Common Core, but there was “an implication that we could lose [financial backing from the state] if we didn’t.”

However, Rigg also noted that teachers are reporting that Common Core “instruction seems more rigorous” and that “they are pushing the students harder and earlier in some key areas than they did in the past.”

“We’re striving for true mastery in a few areas, rather than surface-scraping in a larger number of areas,” he said. “The teachers enjoy that.”

Over the last couple of years, he said Catholic schools in Cincinnati have seen a three-month level improvement in reading scores, while math scores remain about the same. Rigg attributed the controversy over the Common Core to politics.

Jean Johnson, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Diocese of Springfield, Ill., said she is also pleased with her school system’s adaptation of the Common Core standards. She emphasized that there are texts suggested in the Common Core appendices that a Catholic school should never use. Meanwhile, she applauded the increase in word problems in the new math standards.

“I can also see more analysis in social studies,” she said, “where students talk about why things happened in history and solve problems so that these things don’t happen again.”

 

Hoosiers Object

But Heather Crossin, a Catholic parent in Indiana and one of the founders of Hoosiers Against Common Core, sees growing opposition to Common Core nationally. She noted that the Oklahoma Legislature approved a bill last year that repealed Common Core.

But Crossin isn’t pleased about what has happened in her home state.

Indiana was the first state to adopt Common Core and the first to drop it. The state subsequently adopted new standards, which critics charge, are Common Core State Standards with a new label.

Crossin said she hears from parents all over the country, and many are alarmed by Common Core’s emphasis on informational texts, as opposed to literature and reading for pleasure.

“I’ve heard from parents who say that their children aren’t reading any novels — novels are out under Common Core,” Crossin said. “With Common Core,” she added, “we’re going to see teaching to the test like we’ve never seen before — the other shoe hasn’t dropped.”

 

Unanticipated Phenomenon

Maybe the other shoe hasn’t dropped, but several people interviewed for this story have noticed an unanticipated phenomenon: the founding of small, new Catholic schools.

Bob Laird of the Cardinal Newman Society said that schools are “springing up” because of Common Core. Denise Donahue, resource coordinator for the National Association of Private Catholic and Independent Schools (NAPSIS), said she has noticed the same thing. NAPSIS, which recommends that Catholic schools not use Common Core, recently held a conference at which five people were there to learn how to start a Catholic school based on the traditional classical education.

St. Benedict’s School in Natick, Mass., is a fledgling K-12 school that started when a group of Catholic parents were drinking coffee in somebody’s kitchen and started talking about the importance of a classical education. The board of advisers at the school includes Sandra Stotsky, an emeritus professor of education at the University of Arkansas.

Stotsky is credited with having played a key role in developing the much-admired K-12 standards for the state of Massachusetts. She was prominent enough to be invited to become a member of the national Common Core Validation Committee.

Now, she is best known for having taken a look at Common Core and found it woefully inadequate.

“St. Benedict’s was not formed, strictly speaking, to respond to Common Core, but our timing was impeccable,” said Anne Fay, founding head. “We’re hearing [opposition to Common Core] in interviews with parents and also in hiring teachers.”

The website makes the school’s position clear: “SBE provides an alternative to Common Core,” the website announces.

 

Jindal’s Judgment

Opponents of Common Core cite Jindal’s negative judgment as a potential turning point in the debate over implementation of the standards in Catholic schools.

Jessica Couret, a Catholic mother in New Orleans, said that she believes Catholic education officials are taking note of the Louisiana governor’s actions.

“I think they are watching Jindal very closely,” she said. “I don’t think it will be easy to turn things around, but I also think we will win. I am very hopeful.”

Register correspondent Charlotte Hays writes from Washington.