Common Core has become a national joke.
In fact, the set of academic standards has inspired a new genre of grade school humor – Common Core comedy.
For instance:
One student turns to another and says, “Common Core is about making us college and career ready.”
The other student replies, “It’s working. It’s making me drink more everyday.”
Here’s another one:
Question: Why can’t mommy help you with your Common Core math homework?
Answer: She only has a four-year degree.
And finally:
Question: How many whiteboards does it take to show you how to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: One, but it takes dozens to explain 1+4 in Common Core.
Parents nationwide know the pain of Common Core by the looks on their children’s faces.
They see bright, curious youngsters go to school and come back hating education and thinking they’re stupid.
Parents get the same feeling trying to decipher their children’s homework.
Meanwhile the majority of teachers hate the standards – and as they become more familiar with it, that number grows every year.
So why do we keep using Common Core? Why haven’t our schools thrown this bad idea on the trash heap of failed education policies?
In short – because industry is making a lot of money off it.
Common Core was created by private industry.
It was not made by the states, nor was it written by the federal government.
It was created to sell a new generation of standardized tests and textbooks.
It’s raison d’etre is profit not education.
School children didn’t need a unified set of academic standards. Big business needed them to sell more books and tests.
The standards were written by Achieve, Inc., a Washington, D.C., organization formed in 1996 by corporate leaders and six state governors. The endeavor was funded by Bill Gates and other corporate interests. It was reviewed by individuals and organizations also funded by Gates.
Then the federal government stepped in to strongly encourage states to adopt the standards. Not because anyone actually thought they were necessary. They did it because that was what wealthy donors wanted.
Eventually the standards were adopted in 42 states, but not because legislatures voted on them. The standards were quietly approved by state boards of education, unelected state education chiefs and boards of education. Many lawmakers didn’t even know what Common Core was or that their state had implemented it until voters started calling and asking questions.
Moreover, at the time of their adoption, the standards weren’t even completed. They were enacted in many cases sight unseen.
How did the federal government get state officials to do this? Money and threats.
Public schools were strapped because of the great recession. So the Obama administration swooped in to help – on the condition that states enact a series of reforms including Common Core.
The Obama administration did not write Common Core, but it did everything it could to make sure states enacted these standards. In the 2009 stimulus package, there was $4.35 billion in discretionary funds given to the U.S. Department of Education to hand out as state grants. But in order to qualify for these grants, states had to adopt the Common Core. With education funding at a premium, bureaucrats were only too willing to bend over backwards to keep their state’s schools running.
And when the carrot wasn’t enough, the federal government used the stick.
Many states were applying to the federal government for waivers to the disastrous No Child Left Behind legislation. Adopting Common Core and several other corporate education reforms was made a pre-condition. If states didn’t adopt these standards, their schools would be labeled “failing” and lose even more federal funding.
Despite all this, the media still often misrepresents the facts.
It is an objective fact that the Core was written by private industry. So the media never asks that question. It asks if the Core was “state led.” That way there is room for spin.
Who led the effort to enact these standards? Since a handful of governors and other government officials were involved in their creation, media patsies are able to pretend the initiative started with the states. But don’t believe it. It started with private interests – people like David Coleman and Bill Gates – trying to influence government to do what they wanted for their own ends. As President of the College Board, Coleman stood to profit off new books and tests. As co-founder of Microsoft, Gates stood to profit from the new technology needed to run many of these new tests and materials. They led the initiative, not the states.
No government official was ever given a mandate by the voters or their empowered representatives to create or enact Common Core. Those that did so acted in their private capacities. Bribing a handful of governors doesn’t make something a state initiative.
Just because a government official does something doesn’t make it policy. When Chris Christie orders a footlong hoagie for lunch, it isn’t the start of a government program to feed people at Subway. He’s just ordering lunch.
Moreover, when government officials are coerced into adopting a policy because otherwise they won’t be able to fulfill their obligation to voters, that isn’t an endorsement of those policies. You can’t offer a starving child a sandwich on the condition that he shouts a swear word and then pretend it was all his idea. You can’t offer a glass of water to a man dying of thirst on the condition that he shave his head and then pretend that he likes being bald.
Common Core was not adopted by states because they liked it. It was adopted to keep schools running.
Special interests used the federal government’s power over the states to circumvent the legislative process.
The result is a set of poor quality standards that are developmentally inappropriate and don’t help students learn. This should be no surprise since they were written with minimal input from classroom teachers or child psychologists. Instead they were created by standardized test authors. But even if the standards had been good, the process of their adoption was highly undemocratic.
Sadly, this is how government works now.
Charter schools, Teach for America, standardized testing – Public education has been high jacked by business interests.
Once upon a time, the goal was to help students learn. Now the main objective is to help big business profit off students.
If you can make a buck off something – even if it doesn’t help or actually hurts school kids – do it.
Nowhere is this clearer than with the Common Core.
Unfortunately, our 2016 Presidential candidates don’t seem to get it.
Neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump seems to understand the problems with Common Core.
Clinton thinks the only issue is the way the Core was implemented in schools – not federal coercion, not poor quality standards, etc. Schools didn’t implement them too quickly. The standards are badly written, unproven to help and increasingly shown to hurt.
Trump, on the other hand, thinks it’s all wrong, but he has no idea why or what he can do about it. Like too many Republicans, he acts as if the only problem with the standards is Obama’s participation. He ignores or omits the one-time advocacy of prominent members of his own party for the Core like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, and Mike Huckabee.
Neither candidate seems to understand that the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) bans the federal government from doing anything to promote Common Core, or any other set of education standards. This does not, unfortunately, repeal the standards. It emphasizes the states’ power to choose their own academic standards.
Each state legislature can keep, revise, or repeal Common Core. And in some cases, this has already begun. In Oklahoma, for example, Common Core was repealed entirely. In other states, like New Jersey, Common Core has been revised but largely left in place. In other states, the standards remain untouched.
Why hasn’t Common Core gone away? State legislatures haven’t acted.
No matter who wins the presidential race, whether it’s a candidate in favor or against Common Core, he or she has zero power to do anything about it. Hopefully, no one tries to exceed that authority by coercing states one way or another.
Meanwhile, state legislatures need to pay attention to the wishes of voters. If Common Core is repealed – and that’s what the majority of taxpayers want – we can only hope it’s done so in a more democratic fashion than it was approved. We can only hope it isn’t replaced with something worse.
Whatever happens it should be to benefit students, not corporations.
Or to put it another way:
Question: What if Common Core was created just to drive parents crazy?
Answer: Somebody must be making a fortune on crazy meds!!
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