Common Core Is Dead, Long Live Common Core

We live in a remarkable age. Even when Florence Foster Jenkins sang in a packed Carnegie Hall decades ago, music critics were able to say that she did not have the voice of an authentic opera singer. Few in the musical world really cared how Jenkins spent her own money. Perhaps if she had offered to give some of her money to the nation’s music schools or departments on condition that they teach voice students to sing as she did in the recordings of the arias she had paid record companies to make, music critics would have expressed some concern.

Jenkins did show what someone with a lot of money to spend as she wished and a deep self-confidence in her own ill-formed judgments could do; after all, she did fill up Carnegie Hall. But no one believed that Jenkins had any musical authority. Jenkins didn’t entice music educators in the country to change the academic programs in their music schools or adopt her views on what high-quality singing sounded like. The quality of singing at the Metropolitan Opera House was untouched.

On the other hand, when our Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos famously declared in a speech last week to an audience at that bastion of free market thinking (American Enterprise Institute, or AEI) that Common Core is dead, almost everyone seems to have believed her. (We have not seen skeptical reports from AEI or contradictory reviews.) No one at AEI apparently challenged her to provide evidence that Common Core was dead. Why the media, usually hyper-critical of anything DeVos says or does, seems to have given her a complete pass is a deep mystery.

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