First the Blueway: Now the Common Core school standards
Posted by Max Brantley on Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 12:55 PM
The legislature's education committees are meeting today and tomorrow and a hot topic is the Common Core standards, a bipartisan effort that arose from the state's governors and school officials to devise a unified set of goals for American education.
Sigh. It has become the latest conspiracy-theory-run-amuck for the extreme rightwing. Attacking the Common Core is a tea party fave. It's so extreme, that even some arch-conservative education think tanks (the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to name one) have risen in defense and will be among those testifying in Arkansas.
When Sen. Jason Rapert started Tweeting concern about the Common Core, you knew where this was headed. The question is whether the wackjobs can rout the education establishment like they routed the conservation establishment on the White River Blueway.
The Billionaire Boys Club, in the form of the Gates Foundation, has provided a lot of the support for the effort to set a comprehensive agenda for grades K-12. The Washington Post explains here about the Tea Party warpath. The fear now is that states will back away from the Common Core and thus ruin the central idea of having the whole country pulling together toward a common goal of