The Feds are cutting Federal spending. It's hard for the Feds to cut state spending. They impose the SpEd requirements and committed to funding them. Even now they don't fund them fully. Obama's proposed budget doesn't come near to funding those commitments fully.
In other words, he's not paying his bills. IF any president ever fully paid these annual bills, it was long, long ago.
Nobody could actually put reasoned numbers to the budget compromise a year and a half ago, so they put unreasoned numbers to them. These cuts are partly the result of the unreasoned numbers everybody agreed to. A hasty, middle-school compromise struck then is about to bear fruit that nobody wants to eat. Next time perhaps the deal should be one that both can live with, instead of one that each side assumes the other absolutely can't live with. Instead of finding a solution, the kiddies are mostly just pointing fingers and blaming everybody else even though their own signatures are on the deal. Silly kids.
The states are spending state money, and they're spending the money on things that the state originally was working on. CC wasn't started as a federal project. It was a consortium of states working together until, like many things, large funders and the largest funder decided to hop on the bandwagon and make it something it wasn't going to be. Can't let the opportunity to tell others what to do go unnoticed or unleveraged, and to order a voluntary top-down grassroots one-size-fits-all program to ensure diversity and innovation. (Oxymoron? Sure. But that's what it's billed as versus what it is.) Now it's a snowball-become-avalanche that's going to be hard to stop, if only because the fascists are still in charge and the CYAers are everywhere.
The "fascists" insist on saying what has to be taught, and stipulating what the only possible facts on the ground can possibly be. The tests are to confirm this set of facts and, if the test flops, it's not because the assumptions were right. The CYAers are like those in Texas who promulgated the STAAR/EOC tests. They're impossible, but to dispose of them would be to retroactively waste a lot of dough. On the other hand, these are politicians.
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