Potential presidential candidate Jeb Bush advised parents against opting out of Common Core tests Thursday, saying not taking the tests would make it harder for students to graduate high school and go to college.
“If [opting out is] going to make it harder for you to graduate, it’s going to make you harder to get into college, I think you need to rethink [opting out],” Bush said when asked what he would say to a parent who was considering opting their child out of Common Core tests. “The idea that you’re opting out of a test because it’s stressful — what’s the world like?”
Bush’s remarks came during an interview at the conservative National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit in Washington, D.C.
Bush said Common Core was not to blame for the standardized tests, and that schools had to give standardized tests well before Common Core was in place.
This spring, tens of thousands of parents across the country have opted out of Common Core-aligned standardized tests.
He went on to tout his education record as governor, claiming that Florida students had seen the greatest educational gains while he was governor and Hispanic, African-American, and low-income Florida students were outscoring students in other states. He credited accountability and school choice for those gains.
Earlier in the event, part of Bush’s answer to a question about the situation in Baltimore focused on education as well. He said the city needed a radically different education system and that it wasn’t a role model for the country like the system in Miami-Dade County is.
He said education systems need to ensure students aren’t held back if they can learn more, and not passed on if they can’t. “In other words, a customized learning experience for every child in America,” Bush said. “To keep doing it the way we’ve been doing and expect a different result is not going to work. … Every aspect of our life has been customized, why not the most important thing that we do?”
