David Vitter, a Republican in the U.S. Senate from Louisiana, still supports the Common Core standards. However, he has sent a letter to the head of the state Department of Education asking the state to stop making the Eureka Math programme, which is aligned with the Common Core standards, the preferred curriculum.
On Vitter’s website, it says that he sent a letter to State Superintendent John White on Monday. The letter talked about “local control over curriculum and alternatives to Eureka Math.”
“I am very worried about how hard and frustrating Eureka Math is for so many students and parents,” Vitter writes in his letter. “And I think this shows that, even though local control over curriculum is the rule in theory, it is not fully or adequately protected or used in practise,” she said.
“As you know, Eureka Math is not a required curriculum. “But it’s the only math programme that your department has ranked as Tier 1,” the Senator said. “In real life, this has made many local systems feel like they have to adopt it, especially smaller systems that don’t have a lot of resources for curriculum review and development.”
“To fix this, I strongly urge your department to emphasise and protect local control over curriculum,” Vitter wrote. He also asked White’s education department to take three specific steps:
1) Stop saying that Eureka Math is the best way to learn math in any way.
2) Make sure that local school systems have all the tools they need to find good math programmes, including ones that don’t use Eureka Math.
3) Make sure that the way Louisiana tests students who don’t use Eureka Math doesn’t hurt them in any way.