Last week, Governor Paul LePage delivered a letter to the 127th Legislature vetoing LD 1492, “An Act To Establish a Protocol for Review of State Education Content Standards of the System of Learning Results.”
This bill, originally supported by The Maine Heritage Policy Center (MHPC), was sponsored by Representative William Tuell (R-East Machias) to remove the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) from the system of learning results by the end of the 2017 school year.
Although the bill started with strong bipartisan support, the end result was an amended version that completely replaced the original language into a do-nothing bill that MHPC no longer supports. As Governor LePage stated in his veto letter, when it comes to the final version of this bill, “After all is said is done, more is said than done.”
Last week, we reported in The Maine Wire that the final version of LD 1492 is little more than another common core bait and switch. According to the veto letter, the final version of the bill actually does more harm than good by making the current review process worse than it already is, rather than providing a vehicle to repeal common core standards from the Maine Learning Results, as the bill was originally drafted to do.
According to the letter, “Under the current protocol, a review is presently under way for Standard 1, which includes the content for Career and Education Development. Given this ongoing review and recent changes to the MLR, it seems prudent to leave the existing protocols in place rather than add even more bureaucracy with a new layer of unnecessary, inflexible and unproven procedures.”
A vote to sustain the veto is a vote to get out of the way and permit the existing review process to continue to allow the Department of Education to focus on the work of the Blue Ribbon Commission to Reform Public Education Funding and Improve Student Performance in Maine.
While I would ultimately like to see the CCSS repealed, LD 1492 is no longer the necessary vehicle for that change. For that reason, I fully support the Governor’s veto of LD 1492.
