JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Missouri lawmakers took action on Common Core Thursday, but it’s too early to tell if it represents a win for supporters of the nationalized learning standards or its opponents.

The Associated Press reports the legislation – which is still awaiting a final decision from Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon – would establish eight work groups to “develop new (learning) standards for English, math, science and history to be implemented during the 2016 academic year.”

Two work groups would be formed for each subject area, with one focusing on standards for elementary students and the other focusing on standards for secondary students. Members of the work groups would include parents of current Missouri students, as well as individuals who have experience in the specified subject area.

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Group members would be chosen by teacher union leaders, lawmakers, the lieutenant governor and the governor.

The new standards would have to be completed by October 2015, and “the State Board of Education would be required to hold at least three public hearings before adopting the team’s recommendations,” the AP notes.

And while the unelected members of the State Board of Education would still have final say over whether or not the new standards are adopted for the 2016-17 school year, the proposed process is far more transparent and inclusive than the one that brought Common Core into Missouri back in 2010.

As Republican state Sen. Ed Emery told The Kansas City Star, “This puts the process back into the hands of the people. … I personally am hoping it does not get back to a model that looks like Common Core, but I do not see myself as the king of education. … We want the public involved. I think the process needs to be given a chance.”

That’s the good news for Common Core opponents.

The bad news is that the one-size-fits-all standards and the related standardized tests would continue to be used in Missouri during this process. Also, there’s no guarantee the proposed standards will be any different from Common Core.

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“This bill does nothing to stop Common Core,” said Republican state Sen. Ryan Silvey, one of the legislature’s fiercest Common Core critics. “It’s a smokescreen. We left a loophole.”

Obviously, we have no way of knowing what the new standards are going to look like.

But here’s what we do know: If Missouri’s revamped standards vary significantly from the nationalized standards currently being used by 43 other states, it will further erode the entire premise of Common Core, which is to get students in (virtually) every state studying the same concepts at the same time.

The busybodies behind Common Core wanted uniform learning standards so states could generate apples-to-apples student data that educational experts and technology gurus could then use to unlock the “science” of teaching and learning.

Their plan was to use the data to determine which teaching practices are the most effective and which colleges do the best job training teachers so those practices can be replicated in K-12 schools and universities across the nation.

But if states like Missouri (and Indiana before it) change the standards significantly, it will make those apples-to-apples data comparisons impossible, thus turning the entire Common Core experiment to ashes.

All that will remain are a collection of learning standards (of dubious quality) that Americans have spent untold millions to implement.