Former Duval TOY Zachary Champagne takes his silver and endorses Common Core

I get it, I really do. You get a little notoriety, you see an opportunity to make a little more money, and you get to leave the classroom which friends is a lot tougher than Jeb Bush and his ilk would have you believe is, so you jump ship. What I don’t see however is endorsing something that you are trying to stay as far away from as possible. Why would he sentence teachers and kids to something he wants to have nothing to do with? Oh I know it's because after reading about his new job I get the funny feeling he is looking to profit off of common core. he has gone from being a teacher to being a mercenary. 

I don’t want to go line by line and debunk his letter in the Times Union though believe me I could, read it here: http://members.jacksonville.com/opinion/premium-opinion/2013-11-29/story/guest-column-defending-common-core-standards#comment-

So instead I will just give you the four biggest reasons I think common core will be more of the same at best, there has been a new cure all every years for as long as I can remember, or a disaster at worse.

Endorsing common core is to endorse the high stakes testing culture we have now. Somewhere along the way tests went from being a tool to see how kids were doing to the whole kit and caboodle. Common Core does nothing to eliminate or even tone down the testing which has sucked the joy out of learning and teaching for countless students and teachers.

The Cost, despite what Pam Stewart says common core is going to be expensive, estimates for Florida range from a couple hundred million into the billions. Now undoubtedly some of those costs will replace costs we otherwise would have incurred. Some of those costs that is and it should be a huge red flag that the powers that be are not trying to clarify the expenses.  Most of that money by the way will be diverted away from schools and classrooms.

Next it does not address the problem facing our schools which is poverty. When you factor out poverty our children zoom to the top of the international rankings. Common core does absolutely nothing to address poverty and until we do all common core does is throw money down a hole, sorry make that into the bank accounts of testing companies, who are the primary financial backers of people like Jeb Bush who support Common Core.

Finally if Jeb Bush is for it you should be against it. Everything he has supported from his A-F grading scale to charters and vouchers have done great harm to education. He is a flim flam man who sends his children to exclusive prep schools with small classes without high stakes tests while at the same time sentencing our children to schools he would never send his kids to. Furthermore since he was in charge of our education system for 8 years he in effect is saying, I got it wrong with the standards we had in place when I was in charge, I would like a do over, a very expensive do over that doesn’t address our problems (poverty) and allows my backers to get rich, sorry make that richer.

Common Core does absolutely nothing to address the problems in our schools and if Champagne were being honest or actually concerned with improving things instead of just fattening his bank account he would fight for real change not more of the same.