Bobby Jindal probably isn’t a name that immediately comes to mind when education standards are mentioned, and if it is it’s probably for bad reasons, but it may come as a surprise that he’s suing the federal government to end the standards he himself signed into law.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday accusing the U.S. Department of Education of illegally coercing states to adopt the Common Core academic standards by requiring states that want to compete for federal grants to embrace the national standards. [...]
“The federal government has hijacked and destroyed the Common Core initiative,” Jindal said in a statement. “Common Core is the latest effort by big government disciples to strip away state rights and put Washington, D.C. in control of everything.”
Jindal’s record on education is less than exemplary.
Don’t forget that he initiated a program to distribute public funds to religious fundamentalist “schools” with no standards in place. This led to public funds being used to fund programs that taught children that men and dinosaurs lived side by side and that the KKK wasn’t really all that bad.
But while that program was ruled unconstitutional and ultimately fell through, Jindal embraced Common Core as recently as 2012 when he signed it into law.
Now that the state legislature has lined up against Jindal in his opposition to the standards he signed into law, he’s trying to save face with the Lunatic Base of the Republican party by blaming “big government.” He’s suing the federal government to end the standards he supported.
It’s important to keep in mind that “big government” (read: Obama) did not write the Common Core standards nor did the big scary government force him to sign it into law.