Arne Duncan: You’re a Liar, Common Core Will Destroy American Education
This week, TheBlaze’s White House Correspondent, Fred Lucas, conducted an interview withEducation Secretary Arne Duncan.
Fred did a great job reporting exactly what Secretary Duncan said, without adding his own commentary. That’s what a good journalist does.
I, Pat Gray, however, am not a journalist. I definitely add commentary. Oh, and truth. Because Secretary Duncan flat out lied to Fred, and to you.
If you were to accept everything Secretary Duncan said at face value, you could easily say, “wow, this Common Core state standard thing sounds GREAT!” That’s why I don’t recommend that you take everything he said, or what any Common Core advocate says, at face value.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, speaks to the Associated Press during an interview in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013. Duncan says it’s tough to prepare students for college when they’re more worried about being killed than making it to graduation. Credit: AP
Let’s start with Duncan’s claim that Common Core state education standards are not federal-level coercion, adding, as he put it, “as some Republicans in Congress have characterized them.”
That’s Duncan’s attempt to make this sound like a purely partisan issue. It isn’t. There are plenty of Republicans who are very much in favor of Common Core. Some are names you know well, like Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval. Republicans can be just as wrong as Democrats sometimes, I think we’ve seen that.
As for Duncan’s claim that these standards are not federal-level coercion?
Well, let’s see; the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, (also known as the Stimulus Package) dangled federal funds like carrots in front of all 50 states to get them to adopt the