WHY COMMON CORE IS CRACKING UP
Bill Gates’s earnest help hasn’t helped.
After a decade in the making, the Common Core State Standards are on track to replace uneven state standards in English, mathematics, and other basic academic subjects. But as a rising number of parents and elected officials question this emerging national catechism, the program is meeting new resistance.
First proposed by a coalition of governors and state school superintendents, Common Core codifies what elementary and high school students should study and know after completing each grade.
Strictly speaking, the standards are not a curriculum. Nominally, how subjects are taught and the materials used are decisions left to individual states and school districts. Supporters insist they will raise academic proficiency and ensure uniformly high standards across the nation.
The truth is: Common Core ratifies the federal takeover of elementary and high school instruction. In spite of disclaimers, it promotes a national syllabus. Testing for national standards will indirectly dictate what is taught and undermine local control of education.
Technology and testing corporations stand to be the big winners. The president of the College Board — the nation’s premier gatekeeper of admissions to higher education — is David Coleman, who is Common Core’s chief designer and first advocate.
What Common Core vividly demonstrates is the nature of contemporary political power and formation of education policy.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is Common Core’s leading force. Gates created the world’s dominant computer operating system, and he is by all accounts a technocratic genius. But his failed effort to beat back non-performance in education through state of the art facilities and smaller classes illustrates his profound naïveté in matters of culture. His foundation has spent approximately $3.4 billion since 1999 on an array of measures to try to improve public education.
Admitting defeat six years ago, the foundation subsequently turned to developing Common Core standards, spending some $250 million on their development and promotion.
As reported in an exceptional 2014 Washington Post article, the foundation then acted strategically to solidify Common Core support. Sidestepping prohibitions on political activism, it staged a stunning policy coup in education.
The Gates Foundation aggressively targeted state legislators and business leaders, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, private institutes and schools of educations, and the Obama administration.
Gates did not forget what passes for conservative voices in the education establishment. The American Enterprise Institute has received $4 million from the foundation since 2007. The Fordham Foundation, recipients of Gates largess, has produced several hit-and-run reviews of state curriculum standards.
Gates allies also took charge of the federal department of education. In 2009, the new federal education secretary Arne Duncan named Margot Rogers his chief of staff. She had been Why Common Core Is Cracking Up | The American Spectator:
