Common Core Common Sense: Why It’s Illiberal and Unconstitutional
By Dr. Daniel B. Coupland
On May 29th, 2009, Arne Duncan, the new Secretary of Education for the Obama Administration, gave a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In the speech, he said,
We want to raise the bar dramatically in terms of high standards. What we have had as a country, I’m convinced, is what we call a race to the bottom. We have 50 different standards, 50 different goal posts. And due to political pressure, those have been dumbed down. We want to fundamentally reverse that. We want common, career-ready internationally benchmarked standards.
In this short paragraph, the Secretary of Education identified the problems of the past and set a new vision for education in this country. He correctly assessed the damage created by the Bush Administration’s Education policy from 2002 known as No Child Left Behind (or NCLB). While supporters of NCLB can point to limited