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Friday, March 29, 2024 - 07:57 AM

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

First Published in 1994

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF
UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

Four years ago, Dr. Mick Zais was elected Education Superintendent on an anti-Common Core platform.  Now, he’s supporting his deputy, Charmeka Childs, to succeed him after serving only one term.  His letter last week in this newspaper is a lame attempt to rewrite history by blaming others for the failure of the Zais-Childs Team to stop Common Core.

It’s a failure that has driven my candidacy.

Dr. Zais and Mrs. Childs both claim they oppose Common Core, but actions speak louder than words because the two people most responsible for Common Core’s implementation in our state are Mick Zais and Charmeka Childs.

Under Zais and Childs, South Carolina committed our state to the Common Core Smarter Balanced Tests and authored a federal waiver further committing our state to Common Core.  Dr. Zais has even credited Childs as the one responsible for the No Child Left Behind waiver necessary for Common Core’s implementation.

And Mrs. Childs is the one who pushed the Common Core Science standards through the State Board of Education last year.

Now Charmeka Childs is running for Education Superintendent claiming that she “voted against Common Core” but that is true only to the extent that Mrs. Childs was against Common Core before she was for it.

Because if she has done anything, it has been serving as Mick Zais’s number one deputy in implementing Common Core.

Parents and brave teachers are speaking out against the Obama Administration’s Common Core and are rallying behind my candidacy to put a true Common Core opponent in charge of our state’s education department.

Voters are sick of excuses.  We are sick of people like John Boehner telling us they “oppose” ObamaCare but there is “nothing” they can do to stop it.  Similarly, South Carolina voters – and others all across America – are getting fed up with hearing politicians like Mick Zais and Charmeka Childs tell us they “oppose” Common Core but there is “nothing” they can do to stop it.

The time for excuses is over.  It’s time for action.

I have led the fight against Common Core while Mick Zais and Charmeka Childs helped implement it.  And I have put forward a positive three-point platform of exactly what I plan to accomplish as Education Superintendent.

First, I will immediately stop Common Core by using the powers of the office to replace these flawed standards with one centered on restoring the classical education that worked for generations of Americans before progressives were allowed to dismantle it.

Our department will begin an immediate review of all standardized testing and data collection, with an eye towards reducing the practice of teaching to tests instead of to children and using our schools for massive government data-mining operations.

One thing I will not do is replace Common Core with the same thing under another name as has happened in Arizona, Oklahoma and Indiana.

Second, my office will commence a review of every textbook adopted for use in South Carolina schools for anti-American and anti-Christian bias, and blatant falsehoods.  Schools should be for education, not indoctrination or social engineering.

Third, I will push for South Carolina to adopt a school voucher program that will expand the promise of educational choice for all South Carolina families, including those who choose the option of homeschooling.

I am a strong supporter of free-market conservative economics and I believe the free market, not Obama Administration federal curriculum mandates like Common Core, is the way to improve education and help every child reach their maximum potential.

Common Core is destroying public education and having a strong negative effect on private schools as well. There is no other education issue that merits discussion, because if we don’t stop it, we will cause great harm to an entire generation of children and obliterate what is left of an already troublesome public education system.  This is why I am running for State Superintendent of Education.

A conservative state should have a proven conservative leader running our public schools.  I am that leader and I ask for your vote.

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