Chris Christie's Brilliant Politcal Maneuver: Drop Common Core by Giving It a New Name!

The Christie public-policy shell game: behind the curtain, nothing.

NJ Governator Chris Christie has found a new way to assert his leadership(!) by moving to drop the Common Core standards he so recently embraced. What's especially rich about this new maneuver is that there's no there there. As in, is he actually doing something?

NJ.com explains that, beyond burnishing his conservative credentials, he quite likely isn't doing anything:

"You keep the car. You just change the color of the paint," said Christopher Tienken, an associate professor of education at Seton Hall University.

The theory is based on the details of what Christie announced Thursday, including his continued support on Thursday of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) exams, which are aligned to Common Core standards, educators said.

One way that Common Core could stay is with minor tweaks and a new name, said Patricia Wright, executive director of the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association.

...

To design the new standards, Christie called for creating a group of parents and educators to review prior state standards and a make a recommendation. Because the state associations representing teachers, principals and superintendents all endorse Common Core, it's likely they would arrive at similar standards again, Wright said.

...

As long as PARCC carries on so will the teaching aligned with Common Core, Teinken predicted. Regardless of what new standards are designed and implemented teachers are likely to teach to PARCC, which counts toward their performance evaluations, he said.

Nice job, Christie. Maybe you can call the non-new, new standards the "Are you stupid?" standards.