Thursday, March 28, 2024

Fiorina Campaign Explains Past Support for Race to the Top, NCLB

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (photo credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (photo credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign explained her past support for Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind today.  Sarah Isgur Flores, Fiorina’s communications direct, sent Caffeinated Thoughts the following email:

Carly does not support Common Core. As she has said, there is absolutely no evidence that the work of a big, centralized bureaucracy in Washington makes things better. In fact, there’s loads of evidence to the contrary. The Department of Education has been growing in size and budget for 40 years and the quality of our education continues to deteriorate.

Carly has always believed that choice and accountability are necessary to fix our education system. We can do that by having great teachers and by giving these teachers the ability and flexibility to teach the things that our kids need: risk-taking, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Her support for state-based accountability measures in 2010 was about implementing education reforms that encouraged more accountability and transparency at the state level. Common Core, which wasn’t implemented in California until this past fall, has been a set of standards created in DC and driven by the education-industrial complex seeking to commercialize our students. Frankly, the two aren’t even close to the same thing. Carly favors state driven accountability, which she did in 2010 and she does now. That is emphatically not what common core has been or become.

At the time that Race to the Top was proposed in 2009 and when Carly supported it in 2010, it was a funding program based on real performance metrics and opposed by the teachers’ unions. But like so many other government programs with worthy goals backed by flowery speeches, it hasn’t turned out to be what we were promised. Instead, Race to the Top is just the latest example of the federal bureaucracy caving to the powerful interests in Washington and abandoning its original goals.

Voters will have to decide whether they buy her explanation or not.

Shane Vander Hart is the online communications manager for American Principles in Action, a frequent contributor to TruthInAmericanEducation.com, and the editor of Iowa-based CaffeinatedThoughts.com.

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