Ten Common Core Promoters Laughing All The Way To The Bank
The people who wrote and pushed Common Core on the nation are making bank while the nation’s kids, teachers, and parents writhe in the grip of their curriculum contraption.
NPR recently came out with an image-repair article profiling one of Common Core’s five coauthors, former Bennington College professor Jason Zimba. Moms and dads tearing hair out at their kids’ math homework and Environmental Protection Agency regulation reading assignments (yes, that’s really Common Core-recommended) should feel sorry for him, because it says Zimba was frequently up until 3 a.m. devising their family torture device. Somehow, I’m not that surprised or sympathetic to hear Common Core has mysteriously not improved math instruction at Zimba’s daughter’s school. Because it hasn’t improved it much of anywhere else, either.
Even as Zimba and his colleagues defend the standards against cries of federal overreach, they are helpless when it comes to making sure textbook publishers, test-makers, superintendents, principals and teachers interpret the standards in ways that will actually improve American public education, not make it worse.
Like McCallum, Zimba agrees with the North Carolina dad that the question on his son’s Common Core-labeled math quiz was terrible. But as long as Americans hold to the conviction that most of what happens in schools should be kept under the control of states and local communities, the quality of the curriculum is out of his hands. ‘Like it or not, the standards allow a lot of freedom,’ he said.
The real problem with Common Core is that it’s not prescriptive enough! I’m so sorry, fellow Americans, but there’s this little thing standing in the way of applying my education omniscience to all children—it’s called “truth, freedom, and the American way”!
It’s now clear that everyone but the people who wrote and thrust Common Core upon the nation will bear the blame for its failure. First on the list of bumbling idiots: Teachers. Second: Curriculum developers. Neither apparently can understand what Common Core wants them to do. One wonders if it’s written in English? Because, you know, we use language to communicate? It can actually be very precise. Ah, right, even a quick look at Common Core will reveal that it is not, in fact, written in English. Design flaw? No, no: Blame the teachers who can’t read non-English!
Common Core Coauthor Jason Zimba
To the point: NPR further reveals that Zimba gave up his professorship to devote his time to writing Common Core curriculum through an organization he co-founded with two other Common Core coauthors. How much does Zimba make through his public service through this nonprofit? Well, its 2012 IRS form 990 (the latest available—I’ve been through a lot of these babies, and they are usually quite outdated) says he made a cool $332,263. That’s probably not his entire annual income, as he travels to show teachers how to do Common Core right.
Zimba isn’t the only person making a lot of money from constructing a disaster. In fact, everywhere you look, people intimately involved with creating or pushing Common Core are making a lot of money despite having demonstrated exactly zero proven success at increasing student achievement. How convenient for them.
David Coleman, Zimba’s Partner in Crime
David Coleman is another of the five Common Core coauthors, and he and Zimba go way back. They were both Rhodes scholars. Zimba worked at the college Coleman’s mother runs. They started Student Achievement Partners(SAP)—the nonprofit where Zimba now works—together. They wrote a report calling for national curriculum mandates that got them noticed and hired by education nationalizers to write Common Core, for a still-undisclosed sum and under still-undisclosed conditions (apparently, NPR’s reporting only goes so far as the material Zimba and Coleman wish to feed Ten Common Core Promoters Laughing All The Way To The Bank:
