Nancy Jester Republican Georgia State Superintendent Official Campaign Site

Question 1
Dr. Steve Dolinger (moderator and president of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education)
The Georgia Chamber supports higher standards. In fact, Chris mentioned earlier the coalition we are involved with. In fact, it's called Better Standards for a Better Workforce. And, other coalition members are using that tag line. It could be Better Standards for Better Schools, but we want higher standards for our state.

We just hear from Mike Cohen, who gave us a good history of this. Let's follow up with that Common Core. A couple of you showed your cards already. Let's work back this way this time. Tell us your position on Common Core. If you're for it, why. If you're not for it, why not and what would be better.

Fitz Johnson
Is there middle ground? I'm for rigorous standards here in the state of Georgia and I'm here for local control. I understand we have very bright educators here in the state of Georgia. We can set the standards that we need for our youngsters right here in the state of Georgia. That's where I am. The board of education has that right now. It will make a rule which way we go. If I am the state Superintendent, it is my job to support whatever comes out of that meeting.

Nancy Jester I think I've already addressed that. I don't like centralization with standards. I don't think that helps with competition. And, I think that's also dichotomous from career, the whole concept of college and career ready, because you're going to need some different approaches there. So, I think we need to be aligned with that.

I think we have to be real careful too. One way I explain it to my non education friends, is if you've got a high jumper and they're not making the bar at 6ft and you say you raised it, and I'm not suggesting or agree that Common Core does so, but let's just say it did, then they're going to have a problem there. So, the standard is not driving performance. We have to look at what else is driving performance. So, whether you change the standards or not, how are we improving achievement for these children. You can adopt Common Core, and I'm not against somebody voluntarily coming up with a set of standards they find rigorous. I think that's fabulous. But, when you start to attach them to the grant monies like they did, that was the problem. And, it came at a very weak time for governmental entities during the recession and they needed that money. At that time that hadn't even developed the Common Core standards, so people just said yeah we'll do that. Common Core hadn't been seen yet.

So, again, centralization is not a method that leads to success. The Chamber knows that because y'all are business leaders. We know what drives success, that's competition.

Drew Bandelisa
So, what's interesting about Common Core is that it's fundamentally broken and flawed in its implementation. While there are many ways to argue the merits of the idea itself, the key problem, the issue at hand, is the lack of the ability to remove or modify the existing element. That lack of local control. So, while there are those that may argue that's the whole point of having a standard, there are ways of having standards coexist with the outside world yet be able to maintain that control.

So, if we can ??? Common Core. That's something that I can be able to address comfortable enough to work towards. Standards are really important......Working with a lot of different innovators and providers, there's a real danger if we are not able to work within at least different standards. You can have the specifics of how you're doing a particular subject, what are the items you're teaching. But, there are certain elements which can be referenced back to without being able to put standards in place that's still be able to be mapped back to what is going on with the rest of education ecosystem. We're in danger of not having leading applications and leading curriculum, leading providers, the new software that's being developed, none of that coming to Georgia. There's significant concern that people and companies are not going to want to spend the money in Georgia if there's no path forward.

So, Common Core itself, is broken.

Mary Kay Bacallao
We are now in our second year of implementation of Common Core. And, we don't even know how far we've fallen because the test has changed. Because the test has changed, we can't tell what we don't know. I teach math. I've been teaching math for 25 years. Elementary math is gutted. Let me tell you what's missing. We used to have pie being taught in math in elementary school. We used to have probability with coin flipping being taught in elementary school. We used to have area of a trapezoid, all these things are missing. It's almost as if somebody said let's take anything that's interesting or challenging and get it out of elementary school. I have stack of children's books that are no longer applicable to the children we're teaching in Georgia.

In middle school, they have to use these children's books in middle school now. It is shocking to hear people say they're rigorous and internationally bench-marked. I know the difference. I've been in class rooms and I know what we can do and what we're not doing. And the truth of this is being hidden because of the changes in testing. If you look at where you're going with Common Core, all you need to know is all you're going to do is Algebra I, Algebra II, Geometry. That's it. No pre-calculus, no calculus. We don't need to do all this in elementary school, because we don't need to get to calculus and pre-calculus. We're not going to be ready.

If you look at what we're doing in Georgia, and you say if you go to another state and it's going to be the same. Georgia and Utah are the only states that have integrated Common Core. It's different from everybody else's Common Core. Everybody else has traditional Common Core. We have analytic geometry and coordinate algebra. You can't transfer that to another state. You're going to lose half of your instruction. So, we've been lied to. You've been lied to. And, win or lose State Superintendent, I'm going to tell you the truth.