A State Senator is sponsoring a bill SB210 that would prohibit the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education from implementing Common Core State Standards for Missouri public schools.
State Senator John Lamping (R-St. Louis) is pushing to stop the use of having the Common Core Standards Inititative become used in Missouri’s public schools without seeking the approval of the General Assembly.
Lamping is looking to to stop any steps that have been taken to implement Common Core Standards- and have them reversed. He says it raises legal concerns with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education by creating an unfunded mandate.
Lamping says over the last four years, when he’s contacted the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to ask them what they have been up to, he says they provided him with a five-year timeline of a series of meetings and events, public hearings, testimonies, ideas; but they never went to the General Assembly. “There was not one meeting in the last five years, that the General Assembly was informed of what actually was going on,” he says.
Lamping says he calls it the development of a national standard. “The country has a long history of individual states and individual school districts adopting their own standards; and this is an attempt to have the standards in Maine and the standards in San Diego be the same for example,” he says.
Lamping says the intiative would transform the school cirriculum, including the test taking process. He says Missouri would move from a paper and pencil test taking process to an online process that would cost the state somewhere between $350 and $400 million dollars to provide both the broadband as well as the technology.
AUDIO: Mary Farucci reports. (1:03)
To listen to Senator Lamping’s bill proposal, click here. (4:28)
