Rick Perry was in New Hampshire on March 12 at the New England Council’s “Politics and Eggs” event. During the Q&A, Perry was asked about education policy (at around the 34:30 mark in the video):

I’m pretty simple about the K-12 as a potential candidate for the United States. That needs to be left up to the States. I don’t think there is much of a role at all for the federal government. I think your governor, your legislature working with your school administrators, your teachers, and your parents—substantially better place for curriculum to be developed, then a one-size-fits-all out of Washington DC. If the Department of Education needs to be a repository of good practices, that might be a good final state for it. But I don’t think that Washington needs to be this one-size-fits-all, this place where our healthcare, where our transportation infrastructure, where education reform needs to come from. Louis Brandeis, who is not exactly a well-known conservative, former member of the US Supreme Court, said that the states were laboratories of democracy. That states needed to experiment and try different ideas out there. From time to time they’re going to foul up. I will suggest to you, from my perspective, Colorado is making an error in legalizing marijuana, but it’s exactly what Louis Brandeis said. I don’t agree with it, but I respect their right to find out they’re making a mistake.  And the same is true about education policy. I just think that people closer to the schools, closer to your state, closer to understanding what the people of New Hampshire are all about: you’ll come up with the best curriculum, you’ll find the ways to educate your children substantially better than this one-size-fits-all that all too often comes out of Washington DC.

Gov. Perry made sure Texas was one of just four states that rejected Common Core from the start (Minnesota rejected the math but accepted the English standards).  Not even the one-time federal bribe in “Race to the Top” seduced Perry into signing up. “We would be foolish and irresponsible,” Governor Perry said in 2010, “to place our children’s future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special-interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington.”

Gov. Perry recognized the surrender of parental power and state control even before the grassroots rebellion that led Walker, Jindal, Christie, and many other sitting governors to reconsider their previous support for Common Core.

Kudos to Gov. Perry for protecting these core American principles even before the moms complained.

Joshua Pinho works for American Principles in Action.