Republicans in state legislatures across the country are preparing to bring a fresh assault on Common Core education standards.

"Strategists involved in the state-by-state fight against the national K-12 math and reading benchmarks say conservative legislators will introduce or have introduced legislation in dozens of states that will target individual components of Common Core standards, rather than single bills aimed at dismantling the whole program all at once," according to government reporter Reid Wilson's recent Washington Post article.

In Maine, the article said, "conservative legislators are crafting legislation likely to be filed next week that will attack Common Core in three chunks: One would formally withdraw the state from the national standards. A second would change testing requirements imposed by an earlier legislature. Another would prevent the state from sharing education data with federal statisticians. Similar bite-sized measures are likely to appear elsewhere."

“Most of this legislation is being broken up,” said Noah Wall, director of grassroots at the conservative FreedomWorks, which opposes Common Core. “There’s been a tremendous amount of movement that we’ve seen in a number of states.”

Legislators and governors in 46 states, plus the District of Columbia, the article said, "initially adopted the Common Core standards. In the past year, Indiana, Oklahoma and South Carolina have dropped out of the national standards."

“It has divided the party," said Utah Gov. Gary Herbert. " You’ve got [former Florida governor] Jeb Bush and [former education secretary] Bill Bennett on one side supporting Common Core, good conservative Republicans, and you’ve got [Louisiana Gov.] Bobby Jindal and others on the other side saying this is the devil’s spawn. If there’s ever been a program that’s been more poorly rolled out than Obamacare, which didn’t have a very illustrious beginning, it’s Common Core.”

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Article by Kassondra Granata, Education World Contributor