Will Governor Elect Bill Walker Uphold the Law?

The elections are over and neither gentleman responsible for the implementation of the Alaskan Common Core Standards were returned to office.   Those two gentlemen were Governor Sean Parnell and Senator Mark Begich. To his credit, Governor Parnell did sign AS 14.07.020(b) into law, which was enacted by the 2014 legislature to prohibit the Alaska Department of Education from expending money to implement the Common Core Standards Initiative, even if his commissioner did try to weasel out of implementing it.

This law states specifically prohibits the use of any funds from any source to implement the common core.

During the Governor’s race, several activists in our Alaskans Against Common Core group indicated that Candidate Walker was against common core and would suspend implementation of the standards and high stakes testing of the Parnell Administration.  I must confess, I doubted it, because I saw no press release verifying this perspective and I never heard Governor Elect Walker make any sort of promise in that regard within the realm of my own ears and eyes. However, when one hears the same thing repeatedly from several activists in different cities, one wonders if there was any truth to the matter.

But in reviewing message histories, it does seem that several activists in our group insisted that Governor Elect Walker made some kind of murmurings toward that end, or at least, crafted his answer to give some Alaskans the impression that he was against the Common Core Initiative and Alaska's rebranding of it.

The activists at Alaskans Against Common Core are curious if Governor Elect Walker plans to uphold the law and suspend the implementation of the Alaska Common Core Standards and high stakes testing? Surely the incoming Governor would be open to answering a few questions on the matter.

Will Governor Elect Walker uphold Alaska's Laws?

Does Governor Elect Walker agree with the late Governor Hickel that the purpose of public education is to prepare citizens to serve and lead in a free society, or does he agree with the Parnell-Obama mission that the purpose of public education is to simply serve the interests of corporate entities in the form of college and career standards?

Does Governor Elect Walker plan to have a commission to review the standards and testing and hold hearings on the matter with testimony from Alaskans (rather than Gates funded think tanks) the way Governor Hickel did? Does Governor Elect Walker plan to stand up to Barack Obama and Arne Duncan the way Governor Hickel stood up to the federal government in education?

Will Governor Elect Walker continue to support standards owned by the Council of Chief State School Officers that are process based, or will he allow Alaskans to craft Alaskan guidelines that are outcomes based and developmentally appropriate and truly Alaskan?

Will Governor Elect Walker continue to subject Alaskan children to standards that were rejected by over 200 child development expertsas developmentally inappropriate? Or will he kow-tow to powerful corporate interests when it comes to Alaska's children?

Will Governor Elect Walker reject the Alaska math standards that will stifle the stem pipeline of talent and dictate non-standard algorithm solutions?  These are standards that even the writers admitted were not for STEM!

Will Governor Elect Walker continue to uphold Reading and ELA standards that go against a century of research in producing effective readers and writers?

Will Governor Elect Walker restore the data firewalls that protected the privacy of Alaskans? Will he continue to support an educational database known as the P-20W that is built on the Alaska Permanent Fund data  as detailed on page 10 of the grant and includes data from all Alaskan agencies and is given to the federal government under the America Competes grant?

Will Governor Elect Walker continue to allow egregious tenure and retention decisions in the accountability formulas that hold science, social studies, and technology teachers at the high school level accountable for student ELA test scores and are based on race of the student?

Will Governor Elect Walker restore parent choice as it existed before the 2012 ESEA Flexibility waiver?

Will Governor Elect Walker stand tall on state sovereignty and tell Arne Duncan and corporate interests that Alaska’s children belong to Alaska and not them?  Exactly how independent is Governor Elect Walker?

I could not identify one member active in our coalition anywhere listed in the members of the transition team of Governor Elect Walker.  We have economists as members. We have Hispanics and other minorities as members. We have union members and non-union members. We have Democrats and Republicans and members from various other political parties.  Yet, we see none of them in among Governor-Elect Walker’s purview.

 However, we do notice that Senator Mark Begich’s ally, Jim Whitaker, is the Chief of Staff of Governor Walker. Isn't he the same fellow that gave the introductory speech to Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention? Didn't he back Senator Begich who shoved the Common Core and Race To The Top down Alaska's throats? After all, Senator Begich claimed credit for the No Child Left Behind Waiver during his campaign, and a condition of that waiver was the adoption of the common core standards. Is this a sign of things to come? Will Governor Walker be Parnell part two? Or will he really be like Gov. Hickel? 

Governor Parnell forgot about his promise too. He said he would never implement the Common Core in 2010. He said it even as recently as April 2, 2012, and yet, he did implement them, insisting his "new" standards were not common core but “just like them.”  Yes, so much “just like them” that they had to get permission from the copyright holders to change a few words to adopt them. 

Will Governor Walker uphold the law?