The Scotland County Board of Education is confused on Common Core. They seem to think it’s a great idea and that the repeal of it is a bad idea.   The following excerpts come from The Laurinburg Exchange’s article, School board decries state’s decision to repeal Common Core.

Scotland County’s Board seem more worried about the monkeying they are doing with test scores than with the fact Common Core is a fundamentally flawed experiment being performed on our kids. Here’s Board member Jamie Sutherland expressing his test angst:

“The problem we have is that we’re renorming all of these scores and it looks like we’re doing terribly in the schools because our scores are way down and now we’re going to do it again,” said board member Jamie Sutherland. “Something’s got to stay for an extended period of time to allow us to educate and to be able to show growth.”

Well, Board member Paul Rush can top that one. He blames not learning the “intricacies” of Common Core. I can solved this mystery for him: NO ONE WAS EDUCATED ABOUT COMMON CORE.

“The problem with Common Core from my standpoint is that we hadn’t been educated in the intricacies of Common Core,” he said. “It really got shoved – we heard it was coming and had a little bit of information here and there but really as a board never … that’s part of the problem I have with it, I don’t know if it’s good, bad, or indifferent.”

The Scotland County School Board also think Common Core is a curriculum. Pay no mind for the last 4 years we’ve been hammered by Core supporters that Common Core is a set of standards, NOT a curriculum. Jeez, didn’t they get the talking points?

“The intent of Common Core was wonderful because the curriculum that we had in the beginning was too much and there was no way you could teach it all,” said Hargrave.” You could take 20 years teaching the entire curriculum and still not have it all taught. The intent with Common Core was to pare it down and teach those things that were essential for kids.”

We’ve seen the line before — ‘but, but.. we spent so much money on training’.
That’s like saying ‘I don’t know enough about this alligator biting my leg in the water, I should keep it there because well, I’ve come this far!’  Let me amend that talking point for the Core faithful out there —  ‘but..but.. we wasted so much  money on training’.

Meanwhile, the Department of Public Instruction can’t tell anyone the who, what and how much of said Common Core training.  In that same vein, Sutherland apparently wants to throw more good money after bad. Maybe he can tell us exactly how much in state dollars they spent on Common Core training and for what personnel?

“From the local level we spent a lot of money to educate our staff. I mean we changed how we went to school last year so we could do all our education on the front side of that and now we’re going to go back and change again.” (Jamie Sutherland)

Perhaps he should have done his close reading before accepting the flawed and experimental Common Core in the first place, then he would be crying in his budget ledger.