The feud over Common Core in Alabama’s fifth congressional district race between former State Sen. Paul Sanford and former Huntsville City Schools superintendent Casey Wardynski amplified this week in an exchange between the two candidates.
During Monday’s candidate forum hosted in Athens by the Limestone County Republican Women, Sanford, as he has done on a regular basis, took aim at Wardynski over his past comments on the instruction of Common Core in the Huntsville school district.
After decrying left-leaning curriculum and federal involvement in education, Sanford noted his legislative efforts to remove the standards from Alabama public schools.
“[W]e know that the Huntsville city school system was implementing that the whole time I was in the legislature and I fought it,” said Sanford. “A statement was made at one point by one of my opponents over here that if the legislature even outlawed it, that he wanted to still implement Common Core, because he thought it was that good.”
Sanford’s charge against his opponent stems from an April 2015 Huntsville City School Board meeting when Wardynski stated that Common Core should remain in place in the school district if the state were to pass a repeal of the Obama-era standards.
In response to Sanford’s charge, a heated Wardynski pointed in the direction of Sanford and declared that the former state senator did nothing to address Common Core in the legislature.
“[Y]ou didn’t do anything about the Common Core. This district in Huntsville was under federal control. You never involved yourself in that,” proclaimed Wardynski. “That was a state law that brought the federal government in. The state legislature never did anything about it. And you’re a blow-hard about the whole thing. And you didn’t term-limit yourself. People asked you to go home.”
Sanford, alongside other Republican senators, brought forth a bill in 2013 to prohibit the State Board of Education from implementing Common Core standards. Wardynski publicly stood in opposition to the senators’ efforts.
At the time, Wardynski said the standards “spell what we think children need to be able to master to be college and career ready.” The former Huntsville educational leader also said he opposed the bill due to the need of curriculum uniformity among school districts.
During the remainder of his allotted time at the forum, Wardynski touched on what he said was the need for “commensurate” educational standards and asserted that Common Core “became bad” when it was “hijacked” by teachers unions.
“[I]f we’re not teaching our kids to a standard that’s commensurate, we’re not going to be able to compete and as a state, as a community or as a country,” added Wardynski. “That’s why this state adopted Common Core. The problem is the teachers union can hijacked it, just like they do everything else. The left hijacks anything good and makes it their own. And they turned it not from what to teach, but how to teach. And then it became bad.”
Sanford concluded his remarks on the issue by saying that he was “not sure if I just heard a dissertation on how crappy Common Core is or how great it was.”
“But I’m not the one that said that if the state outlawed it, that I’d still implement it. That was him,” finished Sanford.
View the full exchange:
Dylan Smith is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @DylanSmithAL
