Group presents Common Core info on Monday

Nevadans for Local Control of Education will conduct a town hall meeting about Common Core on Monday at 6 p.m. at the Fallon Convention Center.

Jim Falk, chairman of NLCE, said Common Core State Standards for K-12 grades were adopted by Nevada with little information.

“It was adopted on misrepresentation claims about what it was designed to achieve,” Falk said. “They were developed by a progressive education company by writers who have no experience in teaching education. The only two real educators on the committee didn’t agree with the standards and refused to sign off on common core.”

According to the Common Core State Standards website, it says, “The Common Core is a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA). These learning goals outline what a student should know and be able to do at the end of each grade. The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live. Forty-four states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) have voluntarily adopted and are moving forward with the Common Core.”

But according to Bob Clifford, secretary of NLCE, the Common Core standards were never tested before every state adopted them.

“The standards should have been tested in a small area to see how they worked,” Clifford said. “But instead of doing it the right way, the standards just got forced onto each state and were told to adopt them. Our children are being used as guinea pigs and our states and school districts are allowing it.”

Clifford said Monday’s meeting will have a special guest speaker, John Eppolito of Incline Village, who will offer his findings of Common Core after an extensive amount of research. He said Eppolito will present his presentation, “The Truth about Common Core,” which is completely based on facts and hard evidence.

Clifford said he’s hoping for a good turn out Monday night.

“Not many people know about Common Core and what the standards really are and how it’s going in the schools,” Clifford said. “We’re hoping parents, teachers, trustees, etc. will attend the meeting to see the other side of Common Core that people have been discovering. And we want to hear from people about what they think of Common Core, we want to hear from parents and teachers.”

Falk said he recently met with several local leaders of the community and when asked how many of them knew about Common Core, only two out of the eight or nine individuals knew about it.

Clifford said he hopes Churchill County School District trustees will attend the meeting and engage themselves with Common Core so they can make the best decision for the district and all of the students in it.

“I don’t want to hear ‘those are my marching orders’ anymore,” Clifford said. “I want the district to do their job, take responsibility for the new standards, see if they work and meet the needs of the district and students and if they don’t, they need to modify them so they do.”

Falk said the NLCE wants to get the word out about Common Core so informed decisions can be made by residents, educators and legislators.

“Children’s education will affect them for the rest of their lives,” Falk said. “So we need to make sure that they’re led down the right path.”