Incumbent Maine Gov. Paul LePage ® told WABI TV5 that he is fearful what has happened in Massachusetts—slipping from the nation’s top education spot to seventh place—as a result of the Common Core standards, will also happen in Maine.

“First of all, there is always a bet­ter way,” LeP­age said. “And I no longer sup­port Com­mon Core, and I say that because we have been in Com­mon Core for sev­er­al years here in Maine.”

“But after see­ing what has hap­pened to Massachusetts—they were the num­ber one edu­ca­tion sys­tem in Amer­i­ca pri­or to adopt­ing Com­mon Core,” he con­tin­ued. “That tells me that we need to take a hard look, maybe it would be bet­ter going back to what they had before.”

LeP­age said he is con­tin­u­ing to eval­u­ate the Com­mon Core but would like for his state to have the high­est-ranked edu­ca­tion sys­tem in the country.

“We already have a great work eth­ic, why not improve on it,” he explained. “And so, I see the more we chal­lenge our chil­dren here in Maine, the tougher stan­dards that we have, the bet­ter they will perform.”

Inde­pen­dent can­di­date Eliot Cut­ler whole­heart­ed­ly [sup­port­ed] the Com­mon Core stan­dards. Tak­ing the posi­tion that time and effort have already been expend­ed on the new stan­dards, Cut­ler said, “I think the Com­mon Core is a good way of doing that. Let’s just pay atten­tion, do it, eval­u­ate it in five, six, eight years, see how we are doing. But let’s not try to rein­vent the wheel all over again.”

“This is not some kind of com­mu­nist plot to take over America’s schools,” Cut­ler con­tin­ued. “This is real­ly a pro­fes­sion­al­ly devel­oped effort to make sure our kids get educated.”

Demo­c­rat guber­na­to­r­i­al can­di­date Mike Michaud took the mid­dle road, assert­ing that account­abil­i­ty was need­ed in education.

“I think that we need to have some stan­dards, but we got to allow the flex­i­bil­i­ty at the munic­i­pal level.”

As Bre­it­bart News report­ed in July, dur­ing the sum­mer meet­ings of the Nation­al Gov­er­nors Association—one of the own­ers of the copy­right to the Com­mon Core standards—many gov­er­nors pre­ferred not to speak about the con­tro­ver­sial edu­ca­tion ini­tia­tive, refer­ring to it, instead, as polit­i­cal­ly “radioac­tive,” “divi­sive,” and “tox­ic.”