Bobby Jindal Pulls Louisiana Out of Common Core, Is Obviously Running for President

Earlier today, Louisiana Gov.
Bobby Jindal announced that he was unilaterally withdrawing his
state from participation in Common Core. Jindal was once a
proponent of the national education standards, but the federal
government’s heavy-handed way of promoting them has made him wary,
he said.

Via Politico:

“We’re very alarmed about choice and local control of curriculum
being taken away from our parents and educators,” he said at a
press conference. “If other states want to allow the federal
government to dictate to them, they have every right to make that
choice.”

The standards were developed back in 2009 by the National
Governors Association, and they initially drew support from many
Republican governors, including Jindal, New Jersey’s Chris
Christie, Florida’s Jeb Bush, and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker. But the
more people hear about the standards, the less they like
them—unless you ask them in an outright misleading way, as the Cato
Institute’s Neal McCluskey notes in a hilarious post,
“Common Core Survey: You’ll Love the Pufferfish!.”

Common Core is especially unpopular among the conservative
grassroots, given that the federal government is vigorously pushing
it and has incentivized states to adopt it in exchange for grant
money. The controversy has made Common Core an important political
issue heading into the 2014 and 2016 election cycles, and it’s
going to be very difficult for Core-supportive candidates to
survive in the more competitive Republican primaries.

Given that, Jindal’s shifting perspective on Common Core is
probably an indicator that he is going to run. Education Secretary
Arne Duncan, a major Core backer, knocked Jindal’s defection from
the cause as a transparently political move:

“Gov. Jindal was a passionate supporter before he was against
it,” Duncan said. “In that situation it was about politics. It’s
not about education. That’s part of the problem.”

Was Jindal’s move a sincere change of heart or cynical political
calculation? Probably the latter, but who cares? It is preferable
for politicians to be flip-floppers as long as they are flipping in
the direction of greater local autonomy and personal liberty.

The Core standards may not be as evil as some opponents
claim, but there is
very little that supporters can offer as evidence that this
reform was worth adopting. On the other hand, there are many good
reasons to be fearful of Common Core: Its implementation will be
obscenely expensive for taxpayers, it contributes to the creeping
nationalization of local education decisions, and amounts to

crony capitalism for some very largely coroporate education
interests.