Hillary Clinton: Common Core is a Political Failure
Hillary Clinton at the DNC Women’s Leadership Forum in 2014
Photo credit: Karen Murphy (CC-By-ND 2.0)
Photo credit: Karen Murphy (CC-By-ND 2.0)
On Friday Wikileaks leaked part of the over 2,060 emails that were hacked from John Podesta’s email account. Podesta is Clinton’s campaign chairman. The emails reveal transcripts of some of the private speeches that were closed to the press which are very eye opening. The speech excerpts were gathered and flagged by the Clinton campaign research director Tony Clark and sent to a small group of people that included Podesta.
In the attachment included with the email all of the speech “flags” were listed including a comment on Common Core from a speech given at Knewton on July 22, 2014. You can read the entire document yourself here (I have converted it from a Microsoft Word document to a pdf so you can read it online without having to download it).
Here is what she said about Common Core:
Hillary Clinton: Common Core Was “A Political Failure.” In her remarks at Knewton, Hillary Clinton said, “The common core is a perfect example. I mean, the common core was negotiated by a bipartisan group of governors. And maybe they thought — I mean, I think this was a political failure because they negotiated something and they had no real agreed-upon program for explaining it and selling it to people so that they left an opening for those who were always in the education debate, who don’t think anybody should be told anything about what to study, even if it’s the multiplication tables. You know, that that should all be left to local control. And then you get into more complicated areas, as we all know, that that’s just totally off limits. And then using common core results for teacher evaluation when everybody knew that it was going to be complicated to implement.” [Hillary Clinton’s Remarks at Knewton, 7/22/14]
Clinton is right that Common Core is a political failure. She is absolutely wrong in her description of how the Common Core came about. Governors didn’t “negotiate” the standards. Paid staff of the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers based in Washington, DC were the driving force pushed along with money from Bill Gates.
Governors had very little to do with this other than they rubber stamped it when it came to adopting it in their state, and then it was crammed down our throats.Hillary Clinton: Common Core is a Political Failure | Truth in American Education: