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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Utah has not lost any control over its education standards or curriculum by adopting Common Core, according to a legal review presented Tuesday by Attorney General Sean Reyes.
Republican Gov. Gary Herbert requested the review of the state's legal commitments under Common Core in the wake of rising concerns about the benchmarks.
After Reyes presented his review at the state Capitol on Tuesday, Herbert said he hopes the review will reassure people that Utah controls its education and won't give that up to any outside interest.
"There's really some exaggerated notions out there that we find with the legal review are not true. So I would hope people would say, 'Oh, gee, I'm so relieved. I'm glad to know that is really not true," Herbert said.
He added that he's not naive about the controversy.
"If people are looking for a villain, they will continue to look whether they find one or not," he said.
Opponents of the standards said Tuesday that the review didn't satisfy their concerns.
The Common Core standards were developed in 2009 with the hope of replacing patchwork education benchmarks around the country.
They were developed by a bipartisan group of governors and state school officials and promoted by President Barack Obama's administration.
Utah adopted the standards in 2010, and all but a handful of other states signed on as well. But a conservative backlash has sprung up in Utah and across the country, with opponents calling the standards an inappropriate federal overreach.
After lawmakers, parents and others staged several protests about the standards, Herbert in July laid out a plan to address the controversy.
Reyes said his office did not look at every legal aspect related to Common Core but addressed specific questions the governor posed.
Utah has not lost any authority over its standards or school curriculum, and the federal government has no control over Utah's standards, Reyes said.
He said the adoption of the standards was not illegal in any way.
Utah did not receive federal money to adopt the standards and won't lose money if they change them, Reyes said.
Oak Norton, an organizer with the group Utahns Against Common Core, said the legal review doesn't address many of his group's concerns.
"These questions are very narrow in scope and they don't paint the whole picture," Norton said.
Utahns Against Common Core argues Utah has lost local control of its standards and was coerced into adopting Common Core in order to receive federal grant money.
Norton said Utah did not review in advance how much it would cost to adopt the standards and the standards are subpar, among other issues.
"This wasn't about picking the best standards," he said. "This was about applying for federal money."
Norton said he was glad to see that the report said Utah "has been arguably coerced" into seeking a waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind law because Utah cannot meet standards under that law, which comes with "potentially drastic" penalties.
To get a waiver, Utah has to adopt standards to prepare students for college and careers, such as the Common Core standards.
Reyes said "a plausible argument exists that federal entanglement exists" with respect to the standards and the waiver, but he notes Utah adopted the standards two years before receiving its first waiver.
Without a waiver, Utah could lose flexibility in how it spends federal money, but it would not lose the money, Reyes said.
In addition to the attorney general's legal review, Herbert has created a 24-member committee of education experts to weigh in on the benchmarks.
That standards review panel met for the first time Monday and plans to release a in a few months.
The governor's office has also created a Web page to accept public comments about the standards. Herbert said Tuesday that more than 7,000 comments have been submitted and will be forwarded to the panel.
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