Fight Against Common Core in Alabama Nearing a Decade

John Rice, President of the East Alabama Republican Assembly, has recently made diligent efforts to remind his compatriots of the nearly decade long struggle that has been undertaken by advocates of limited government to rid the educational system in Alabama of Common Core ideology. Rice stated "This coming January will be ten years since the Barton event. A Republican waste, simple as that. Hey, we Alabama Republicans, repeal Common Core or we just need to shut up. We are not conservatives in this state. Blame the teachers, blame the Democrats, blame AEA. Nonsense! We adopted Common Core and we need to repeal it now." January 2024 will mark the tenth anniversary of a 2014 conference held in Dothan with guest speaker David Barton who briefed the audience on Common Core and the dangers it posed for our state and our nation at that time.

Further expanding on his thoughts, Rice declared "A decade ago your State Republican Party voted 407-1 to ask the legislature to remove all elements of Common Core National Indoctrination and you have failed us. Many folks in Alabama including Ann Eubank have been pointing out that the Standards for K-12 in our state are undermining previous successes that we had made. Now what? Still no standards away from the common core for Alabama. Support our teachers...get rid of common national standards that undermine families and parents. Let our teachers teach the way we were taught. This is on you legislators who kiss the ring of the Business Council of Alabama who opposes adopting our state standards that had us excelling in 2010. Call your legislators and state school board members and demand a return to state standards." He went on to continue "Alabama was ranked 25th and 26th Nationally in reading and math in 2010. What happened to drive us to the bottom? Dang sure was not the democrats. OUR Party took total control of politics in Alabama. Then the bottom fell out. You can hang that on the President of the Business Council of Alabama, Bill Canary, which according to his own testimony, took control of selecting the state school superintendent and education legislation (Common Core, etc). BCA put its foot on the neck of the Alabama Legislature with its' huge war chest and political contributions. Millions spent to control education and what a disaster it has been. Take credit BCA, you got us to the bottom."

Former Governor Bob Riley had entered his last few lame duck months of being in office when Republicans won a majority in the Alabama legislature for the first time on election day in November 2010. Instead of waiting for the incoming Governor-Elect Bentley to take office, the newly elected Republican legislators whose assumption of office was effective immediately used their newly won majority status to hastily push through the adoption of Common Core at the behest of Governor Riley and his shadowy benefactors. Since that fateful error in judgement by Alabama Republicans any and all attempts to repeal the adoption of Common Core have been thwarted first by Chairman of the House Education Policy Committee Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin with continued obstructionism carried on by her successor Rep. Terri Collins which has continued to this day. McClurkin and Collins have consistently prevented any legislation intended to curb or repeal Common Core from getting out of the committee over which they have presided in the years since it went into effect.

Seeking further clarification on the nature of this educational decade of debacles for Alabama, the Examiner conducted an exclusive interview with Ann Eubank, a resident of Hoover, who as Chairwoman of Alabama Legislative Watchdogs has worked tirelessly alongside John Rice to put an end to Common Core's influence. Detailing the nature of the beast, Eubank stated "What is being taught in schools today is the government of tomorrow. The fallacy that people think 'well, we don't have common core any more', that is not true. Common Core has been renamed three or four times, I think now the latest one is Alabama college and career ready standards. The fallacy thinking is that common core is standards, but it is not. It is an octopus, it is standards, it is textbooks, it is curriculum, it is teacher development, data collection. We used to say it was an octopus, well now it has grown so big it is a spider web.

Common core teaches our children, I don't care what you call it by the name; common core, college and career, national standards, because basically that's what it is. It has taught our kids to become good little socialists because that is what is was designed to do. It is kind of a creeping...valued based, not fact based like classical education is. Common Core is value based and mental health control of our children's attitudes, values, beliefs. They are indoctrinating and not educating."

Eubank expounded "Anyone in this country who believes in God, family, country is being described as mentally ill. That takes family and parents out of the equation if our children are being taught that because we believe in individualism, we believe in America, we believe in the rights of persons. What this sets up in our children is cognitive dissonance. Our children are being taught by consensus. There is no such thing as being an individual in school. If you are, you are different. You have to believe what we believe, there must be a consensus of opinion. Such as '2+2 is 4' but if the classroom says 'no, 2+ 2 is 5' then that is the right answer. Everybody in the world knows 2+2 is 4 but because the consensus changes with whatever the community says, our kids are confused constantly."

Asked about how this dreadful situation came to be, Eubank noted "Our 'Republican', I do that in quotes, legislature has put mental health professionals in the schools because our kids are so screwed up mentally. It is because of collectivism and consensus learning, not fact based, whatever you believe is ok. They passed a numeracy act because our kids can't do math. They are not taught absolutes, they are not taught concrete functions. They passed a literacy bill to help our kids learn how to read, our kids are are not taught phonics any more. They actually passed a bill for them to learn how to write in cursive in the fourth grade, because if they don't know cursive they can't read founding documents." She went on to continue "It is all about federal dollars. The so-called Republican legislature has never seen a federal dollar that they didn't want. They have spent billions, astronomical amounts of money on education since 2010 with a downward trend in education. There has been no measurable improvement, it has all been downward simply because they wanted those Obama federal dollars. Obama used a program to say 'well, if you take Common Core we will give you lots of money.'"

Citing a study by Heritage Action For America, Eubank stated "Forty-one percent of the nation's education administrative costs are because of federal reporting requirements. If you look at that great, big white building sitting behind the state house called the Gordon Persons Building it is full of people trying to report to the federal government what their dollars are doing. I asked a question one time 'Who has done a cost analysis of how much Common Core is going to cost us?' and they looked at me like I am crazy. The administrative state in education has grown exponentially because of it. A lot of the money that we are spending is for vice principals, assistant principals, it is never getting to the classroom. That is a Republican problem because they approve those educational trust fund budgets that increase the administrative state in Alabama."

Further underscoring the dire nature of the status quo, Eubank remarked "You can say we have a uni-party because our Speaker of the House was a democrat a few years ago. We have Democrats running the Republicans. We're getting indoctrination, not education, because they fail to recognize or they don't want to recognize what has happened. This whole 'we have to level the playing field', Common Core was designed to level the playing field by bringing down those highly educated to the common lowest level. All of these workforce development programs, Common Core was designed for the public private partnership. We have a workforce commission, we have T20 that follows a child from pre-k all the way to workforce. There is a data collection program in the IT department of Alabama that follows every single person. Republicans did that, if that is not communism or socialism I don't know what it is. They have facilitated the destruction of our education system here in Alabama." She went on to continue "We are fighting a headwind of BCA who wants the workforce development, it's all about jobs. It's not about classical education, it's about being trained to do a job that we need here in Alabama. That's a socialist ideology. Why the people can't see that if you educate a kid to the best of their ability, they are going to be able to find a job. Why should we as parents and taxpayers and grandparents in the State of Alabama fund workforce development for private corporations?"

Bringing her thoughts full circle, Eubank explained "It is called corporate fascism, because we will do what corporations tell us to do. You are a 'worker'. During the whole pandemic, the hospitals and the doctor's offices, Alabama Power 'You will get a vaccination or you're not going to work here'. In order to reach the point of corporate fascism, we have a dumbed down society that doesn't understand what their rights are as citizens, as children of God. Corporations are going to rule us and we call it corporate fascism. It's Alabama Power, it's Regions Bank, it's Volkert, it's McWane Steel. All of the big corporations that are the footprint of Birmingham, that's why we call them 'downtowners'. They control the legislature through the BCA."

Shining a light on the insidious agenda at hand, Eubank noted "The elitists are sending their kids to private schools or they live somewhere like Vestavia or Mountain Brook. There will be no middle class left once Common Core gets finished. You can call it education standards, but it is more of a cultural change for a workforce. Elites get to go to the special schools and get the classical education that we all used to get. I remember the days when we read Shakespeare in English class, that is unheard of now." She went on to continue "Bob Riley used to be on the charter school commission but they finally kicked him off. He's still part of the Scholarship Grant Organization in Florida started by Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush started charter schools with the intent of destroying the public schools or making two separate public education systems. If you put a charter school in a black neighborhood without transportation options, how many kids are going to get to that school? If you put a charter school in a rich neighborhood like the Alabama School of Fine Arts or the STEM up in Huntsville, only the best get to go there."

Concluding her line of reasoning, Eubank asked "So what have they done? They have left the middle class and the lower class in the failing public education systems that are only teaching our kids enough to get a job, not to be a well educated citizen. Riley still gets 5% of everything that is in that scholarship fund and then the people who build and run the charter schools are getting X amount of dollars for each student and they're making money."