Editor,
Local school board candidate Annette Gibson used her campaign to sound the alarm about new federal and state curriculum standards being imposed on public schools to nationalize education in America.
The response by the school board and their pyrotechnic superintendent was to inflame the debate by using school resources and personnel to take sides in the election campaign.
First, instead of insulating the new LBHS principal from local politics, the school board and superintendent used him in the final days of the elections as a stalking horse. The new principal lamely defended the board’s sloppy, incoherent and wasteful roll out federalized Common Core curriculum in our schools, relying heavily on hired out of town consultants and contractors.
Next, surrogates of candidates Ketta Brown and Carol Normandin ignited a letter writing campaign attacking Gibson personally, parroting government consultants paid to market federal takeover of local schools. Arguments aimed at Gibson included the sleight of hand claim Common Core merely defines standards and isn’t a formal curriculum program. Others warned challenging Common Core will jeopardize state policy “allowing” Laguna Beach to fund local schools from local property tax revenues.
What’s best for our children gets lost in the demands for more reliance on computers, teaching students to be data processors and computer programming “code writers.” To make us more like the Chinese work force, Common Core substitutes “gadget dependence” for the classical disciplines of humanities, science and the arts.
Common Core was imposed under the label “standards” without being vetted as formal curriculum, and that is the problem not an excuse for it. The idea that more state, federal money trumps local control over content of curriculum is simply shameful abandonment of our kids to a government social engineering experiment.
The next step taken by the school board and superintendent to suppress civic discourse on Common Core was to call a selectively announced public meeting featuring a paid consultant hired by the state public education establishment to market Common Core.
Voters’ split decision between the candidates on Common Core means the public wants dialogue. Hopefully the siege mentality on our school board will not continue.
Christopher Kling, Laguna Beach
