PHOENIX – Common Core may be in trouble in Arizona after the Senate Education Committee on Thursday approved four bills that would either repeal the nationalized math and English learning standards or allow local school districts to opt out of them.

The most far-reaching piece of legislation is Senate Bill 1310, which would prohibit state officials from implementing Common Core and would require Arizona to drop the forthcoming PARCC test, a standardized assessment that’s aligned with Common Core, reports AZCentral.com.

The Senate Education Committee “approved three other measures that, in one form or another, would take away the power of the state to set educational standards and instead leave that role to local school boards,” reports the Arizona Daily Star. “The only requirement would be that the local standards could be no lower than those set by the Board of Education in 1999.”

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

State Sen. Al Melvin, the Republican sponsor of SB 1310, said Common Core started as a “pretty admirable pursuit by the private sector and governors” to improve education, but that it started going awry when it was “hijacked by Washington, by the federal government.”

Melvin fears Common Core might become an Obamacare-like tangle of federal regulations handed down by “unelected bureaucrats,” the Daily Star adds.

Before Common Core opponents start doing cartwheels in celebration of the Senate Education Committee’s favorable vote, it must be noted that for any of the bills to take effect, they must win approval of both houses of the Arizona Legislature and then be signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican who’s strongly in favor of the nationalized learning standards.

Those seem like pretty long odds. However, it’s an election year, which means politicians are extra-responsive to their constituents’ demands. Common Core opponents could pull out a surprise victory, but they’ll have to do battle against the state’s business community which seems staunchly in favor of the new standards.

Tom Franz, president of the Greater Phoenix Leadership, told AZCentral.com that his organization supports the one-size-fits-all standards because they will do a better job preparing high school students for college or postsecondary technical education.

“High school is no longer the finish line,” Franz said.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

While that’s certainly true, it’s doubtful the many pro-Common Core business experts could identify a specific math or English standard that will significantly improve the state’s public education system.

It’s more likely that Common Core enthusiasts such as Franz are falling for the clever marketing plan that has labeled the standards as “rigorous” and key to developing future workers who possess “critical-thinking skills.”

The fact is nobody knows if Common Core is truly “rigorous.” The standards have never been field tested on actual students in an actual school, so all those guarantees are only the supporters’ hoped-for outcomes. What the actual results will be are anyone’s guess.

But, for the sake of argument, suppose that Common Core does do a better job of preparing kids for the state’s labor force. Does that mean Americans should jump aboard the Common Core bandwagon?

A number of thoughtful Common Core critics have pointed out that using K-12 education to transmit job skills to students is a bit of a fool’s errand, as job skills are continually changing.

Hillsdale Professor Terrence Moore has pointed out: “Jobs don’t make the human mind. The human mind makes the jobs. If we start with the idea of training the human mind first and foremost, then there’ll never be a shortage of jobs.”

Instead, Moore and others say the purpose of K-12 system is to develop students’ minds – through the study of literature, history and mathematics – so the upcoming generation of Americans can be participants in – and protectors of – our representative democracy.

It’s an approach that made America’s economy the envy of the world for the past 200 years or so.

Maybe the solution for America’s faltering education system is to be found in the past, rather than in the latest K-12 education fad that seems destined to under-deliver and disappoint.