DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — In Iowa's leadoff presidential caucuses, longshot Democratic candidate Martin O'Malley could finally be a player.
That's probably not because of any hidden depths of support for the low-polling former Maryland governor. Rather, the quirks of the Iowa process mean that candidates must have a minimum level of support in each of the state's nearly 1,700 voting precincts. If O'Malley backers can't reach the threshold, they will have to select another candidate.
On Nov. 17, 2015, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted not to move forward with the PARCC test (a national Common Core-based test) and instead to adopt a "hybrid" test called MCAS 2.0. Although it was widely reported that Massachusetts had dumped Common Core, the move by the Board was, in fact, a deliberate effort to make the public believe that the state had scrapped the controversial national standards in favor of the state's own superior pre-Common Core standards.
Nobody – not the Board, the Commissioner, nor the Secretary of Education – mentioned that the hybrid test will have to be based on Common Core because of the Board's 2010 vote to dump the state's own standards in mathematics and English Language Arts and make Common Core's standards the state's official standards in these two subjects.
