Last year, campaigning for re-election, I said to Tennessee voters, “Give us a Republican majority in the United States Senate, and we’ll repeal the federal Common Core mandate and reverse the trend toward a national school board.”
Last week, the United States Congress did just that, and President Obama signed it. The Wall Street Journal called our legislation fixing the 2001 No Child Left Behind law “the largest devolution of federal control to states in a quarter of a century.”
Twice, partisan Democrat proposals had failed to fix what Newsweek called “the law everyone wants fixed.” This year, as the Senate Education Committee’s new chairman, I made it our first priority. Our proposal was bipartisan. It could not have been enacted without the support of Democrat senators and the signature of a Democrat president.
First, the new law explicitly prohibits Washington from mandating or even incentivizing Common Core or any other specific academic standards.
Second, it prohibits Washington from deciding which schools and teachers are succeeding or failing.