The surprising conservative roots of the Common Core: How conservatives gave rise to ‘Obamacore’
When Jeb Bush announced he was exploring a run for President, TIME warned that Bush was “going to have to win over the Republican conservative base, which hates Common Core with the fire of a thousand suns.” In case conservative loathing of the Common Core ran the risk of being understated, theWashington Post weighed in with an analysis statingthat “The conservative base hates—hates, hates, hates—the Common Core education standards.”
That media shorthand vastly oversimplifies not just the debate among conservatives over the Common Core but the rich, conservative roots of the standards themselves. As I show in a new Brookings paper, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) embody conservative principles in setting goals for student learning that date back to Ronald Reagan. In fact, compared to his predecessors in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has substantially shrunk the federal role in advocating for anything resembling a model national curriculum, national standards, and national assessments. Implementation of the Common Core standards is still proceeding in more than 40 states in no small measure due to the fact that the Obama administration did not repeat the federal overreach of their GOP predecessors by funding the development of national standards and model curriculum.
The conservative roots of the Common Core are little known today. Even among reporters who cover the education beat, few are familiar with, and even fewer have written about, the47-page secondary school model curriculum guide and the 62-page elementary school curriculum guide that William Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, wrote and the Education Department published in 1987 and 1988. Nor have reporters recounted, except in passing, the sweeping, self-described “crusade” that Senator Lamar Alexander launched to promote national standards and voluntary national assessments when he was secretary of education in the elder Bush’s administration.
George H.W. Bush’s America 2000 plan, which Lamar Alexander personally helped to craft, was a remarkably ambitious reform program that makes Barack Obama and Arne Duncan’s efforts to encourage voluntary state adoption of the Common Core standards look timid. Unlike the Obama administration and Secretary Duncan, Secretary Alexander supported the development of voluntary national standards developed with federal funding, for seven subject areas (English language arts, science, history, geography, arts, civics, and foreign The surprising conservative roots of the Common Core: How conservatives gave rise to ‘Obamacore’ | Brookings Institution:
