BOISE — A Georgia lawyer at a conference here recently urged opponents of the Common Core Standards for Idaho K-12 public schools to contact state legislators about getting the policy rescinded.

    Opponents of the Common Core Standards policy could potentially gain support from the Idaho Legislature — as opposed to seeking executive help from Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter, and state Public Instruction Superintendent Tom Luna, “who speaks around the country talking about how great it (Common Core) is,” said Georgia attorney Jane Robbins.    

    “It’s going to have to be the legislators who are willing to stand in the gap, who are willing to say, ‘I don’t care what you say about me. I don’t care what you accuse me of. I don’t care about you calling me a black helicopter person or whatever you want to,’” Robbins told a crowd of 200 at the Boise Centre on the Grove.

    Robbins earlier had said that a “massive student database,” spurred by federal education program requirements connected with Common Core Standards could eventually cause violations of privacy rights by possible transmittal of the collected information about children to some federal government agencies.  

    Robbins said opponents of Common Core should try to get Idaho lawmakers to require the State Board of Education to reverse the Common Core policy.

     “You need to get your legislature to make them (the State Board of Education) do it, and say ‘We are out of this,’” said Robbins, a senior fellow with the American Principles Project.

    Currently, Common Core standards are scheduled for implementation in Idaho schools during the 2013-14 school year. The state Board of Education originally adopted Common Core Standards in Idaho in November 2010 and the Idaho Legislature’s Senate Education Committee gave the policy its blessing in January 2011.

    Saying that, “we’ve got states talking about getting out of this,” Robbins said it’s her view that Common Core Standards policies approved in recent years within U.S. states will ultimately be rejected.

    “I think that Common Core is going down,” Robbins said. “The only question is: How long will it take, how much money will be wasted, and how many children will it waste in the process?”

    Robbins was one of three panelists at the conference named “The Problem With Common Core,” that included speakers Sandra Stotsky, an English education professional — who has worked in Massachusetts — also listed as a “former professor of education reform,” and “mathematics standards professional,” Ze’ev Wurman, a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California.    

    Speakers critiqued the Common Core Standards and fielded questions from the audience during a four-hour conference with Robbins saying “there are movements all over the place,” within states to try to repeal the Common Core Standards policy that opponents said has been promoted strongly by the National Governors Association and an organization of public schools state superintendents.

    The Saturday conference in downtown Boise was named “The Problem With Common Core.” Stotsky asserted that the Common Core Standards, deemed “rigorous,” by proponents, actually weaken academic standards. “Rigorous has been used over and over again,” to describe Common Core, said Stotsky, who then drew a laugh saying: “Rigor mortis would be more like it.”     

    Common Core Standards have been designed with future standardized testing in mind, according to Stotsky.

    “You could have a very highly demanding test, and then set such a low cut score that everyone passes, so, you cannot say you necessarily have rigorous standards ... . But in actual fact, by the time you get around to who’s passing and who’s failing, it turns out the rigor isn’t there,” Stotsky said.

    She added: “But, we can’t even go up to the passing score, or the cut score because it hasn’t been determined yet. This is going to be another game that will be played out, very interestingly, in public, in the next couple of years once the tests are ready to be given, and are given.”