DALLAS – Yesterday, tough man Chuck Norris waded into the Common Core controversy and drew some common sense conclusions.

He writes:

In 2007, a group of governors and state education chiefs got together to try to remedy the declining and degraded U.S. public academic system.Their goal was to establish a new set of standards that better prepared kids for college, careers and their ever-changing, hyper-connected and globally competitive world.

In short, as a result, the Common Core State Standards were born.

In 2010, standards were published and made available for mathematics and English language arts. Though standards for science and social studies are still in development, the goal is for states to have 85 percent of their curricula based upon the full spectrum of those standards.

CCSS advocates pitch that the initiative is a step in the right direction from the disastrous No Child Left Behind federal system. But not everyone is catching the CCSS fever. In particular, there are concerns about federal overreach into and control of their local academic arenas.

By 2009, 45 states had signed on to join; Virginia, Nebraska, Texas and Alaska declined CCSS adoption. Minnesota partially adopted the language arts standards but rejected the math ones. And some other states have since jumped ship in other ways. In August, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Oklahoma and Utah withdrew from the assessment groups designing tests for the CCSS.

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