Common Core: A Slippery Slope

If advocates admitted that it increases Washington’s power, we could have a better, more honest debate.

Since the effectively national Common Core education standards were unveiled in 2010, advocates have insisted that they’re a “state-led” effort. President Obama declared in the 2011 State of the Union address that “these standards were developed . . . not by Washington, but by Republican and Democratic governors throughout the country.” This past June, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan thundered: “The federal government didn’t write them, didn’t approve them, and doesn’t mandate them, and we never will. Anyone who says otherwise is either misinformed or willfully misleading.”

Tony Evers, state superintendent for Wisconsin, told the Wisconsin legislature: “To those who are concerned that the Common Core represents too much ‘federal intrusion’ . . . let me say clearly that I was not coerced by the federal government to adopt the Common Core and I didn’t adopt” it in response to the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” federal grant program, which rewarded states for adopting the Common Core. It’s apparently just a coincidence that Wisconsin adopted the standards on June 2, 2010, the day they were released — as promised in the state’s “Race to the Top” application. Just as it’s presumably a coincidence that Kentucky adopted the standards before they were released — a move celebrated in its Race to the Top application.

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