How we got the Common Core Standards: Federal Manipulation Through Race to the Top
From the Truth in American Education, An admission of Federal manipulation through Race to the Top:
Arne Duncan’s former chief of staff pulls back the curtain on Race to the Top
We couldn’t keep up with the enormous load of data that the competition generated—and we learned that we didn’t have to. The public did it for us. State and local watchdogs kept their leaders honest by reviewing and publicly critiquing applications. Education experts provided analyses of competition data. And researchers will be mining this trove of information for years to come.
Joanne Weiss was the director of the Race to the Top program at the U.S. Department of Education and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s chief of staff. She wrote an essayat Stanford Social Innovation Review that is enlightening in that we finally have a USDED official admit the truth about the federal role in foisting Common Core on to the states.
I encourage you to read the whole piece, but I’ll pull a few excerpt f interest.
Weiss acknowledges that budgetary challenges along with offering larger awards induced states to apply.
The competition took place during a time of profound budgetary challenge for state governments, so the large pot of funding that we had to offer was a significant inducement for states to compete.
This process is typically different than how federal grant making has been done before as she explains:
…we decided that winners would have to clear a very high bar, that theyHow we got the Common Core Standards: Federal Manipulation Through Race to the Top | Seattle Education: