White House was ‘grateful’ to Jeb Bush for helping with Common Core, says former Obama aide
This can’t be a tweet that Jeb Bush is going to like.
Daniel Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to President Obama for strategy and communications, expressed the White House’s gratitude to the former two-term Florida governor on Thursday, the day of the GOP presidential contender debates were held in Cleveland. For what? For supporting the Common Core State Standards and even helping them to persuade states to adopt them.
Here’s the tweet:
Bush has been on the defensive for some time over his long-time support for the Common Core, a set of math and English Language Arts standards that most states adopted several years ago. When he became the governor of Florida in 1999, he became a pioneer in the corporate education reform movement that used student standardized test scores to hold schools “accountable,” promoted vouchers and charter schools, and pushed to change the way teachers were credentialed. When he left office in 2007, he became a reform evangelist around the country, promoting his “Florida Formula” while advising states on how to adopt the same reforms.
He was an early and consistent Core supporter, even as other Republicans began to turn against the initiative, which had the support of the Obama administration. (While the administration did not write the standards, it did make adopting common standards a requirement of states wanting to win federal Race to the Top money and/or a waiver from the most onerous aspects of No Child Left Behind. The administration also provided some $360 million in federal funds to two multi-state consortia to develop new Common Core standards tests.)
A few years ago Bush had no problem speaking harshly about Common Core critics. For example, in October 2013, he told an audience at his Foundation for Excellence in Education’s annual conference:
“What I want to hear from them is more than just opposition. I want to hear their solutions for the hodgepodge of dumbed-down state standards that have created group mediocrity in our schools…. Criticisms and conspiracy theories are easy attention grabbers. Solutions are hard work.”
After he became a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, he began to offer far more nuanced support for the Core and was much kinder to its critics. In May 2015, he told Fox News host Megyn Kelly:
Common Core means a lot of things to different people, so they could be right based on what’s in front of them. I respect peopleWhite House was ‘grateful’ to Jeb Bush for helping with Common Core, says former Obama aide - The Washington Post:
