The good news is that Colorado could be getting an infusion of cash into K-12 education.  The bad news, say some local school officials, is that school districts will have to relinquish even more local control–long protected in the state Constitution.

Last week, the Colorado State Board of Education voted 4-3 to adopt federal education standards, dubbed “Common Core Standards,” to better position the state for winning federal “Race to the Top” dollars, a competitive federal grant that will be awarded to a few select states that qualify.

To be considered for the grant, a state must adopt the federal core standards.

Last May, lawmakers narrowly passed legislation significantly reforming how tenure for teachers is treated in Colorado–despite tremendous push-back from the Colorado Education Association. The legislation  represented another effort to win Race to the Top funding in the first round of grant picks. Colorado did not the make the cut, however,  with the passage of the reform bill–Senate Bill 191, sponsored by Sen. Michael Johnston, D-Denver.

Now, state education officials believe the adoption of the federal Common Core standards will better position Colorado schools to win a share of funding in the second round of Race to the Top competition.

Yet, Susan Goettel, superintendent of the Meeker Rio Blanco RE 1 School District, in Meeker, said the handful of schools in her remote rural community, tucked away in the northwest corner of the state, already do an excellent job of educating students and that the new standards probably won’t have much of an impact on the just under 680 students in the district’s K-12 schools.

“I personally don’t see that it will cause that big of a difference if you’re a district that already has district standards that have been well above the state standards,” said Goettel.  “We have a very proud tradition in our community–and whether or not we get a say on what we do and how we do it is a concern to our constituents as well as our board members.”

The shift from local control to state control and now to federal control is simply a sign of the times said Goettel, but the issue of who should determine local standards won’t go away anytime soon.

“The times they are a changing,” acknowledged Goettel.  However, Goettel maintains that “local control is always an issue.”

Echoing the observations of Goettel, a rural district in the far southeast corner of Colorado, Lamar RE-2, has the same concerns as its northwestern counterpart.  Chuck Soper, the newly installed superintendent, said that the federal standards in and of themselves are not worrisome but that the gradual erosion of the “rich tradition” in Colorado of local control for school districts is disconcerting.

“They’re (the standards) not substantially different from the already-adopted Colorado standards, so we’re not intimidated by them,” Soper said. “As an educator, I guess I’m a bit concerned about the trend toward what appears to be national education standards. This Race to the Top application that Colorado has got itself involved with … it looks like there’s quite a bit of emphasis on regional or national standards and regional and national assessments, and that’s a bit concerning to people who are used to local control.”

The Lamar school district educates around 2,000 students, said Soper, and because of its small size, the district is able to approach things in ways that larger towns aren’t able to with excellent results. Nudging from the federal government is not necessarily welcome for a small community such as Lamar.

“Nationalized standards … leave people in rural school districts a bit chagrined,” he said.