Читать книгу The Education Invasion - Joy Pullmann - Страница 7

CHAPTER 1

Origins — Nationalizing Education under the Radar

JAMIE HIGHFILL ENTERED the classroom in 2002 as an eighth-grade English teacher in Fayetteville, Arkansas. A Gulf War veteran, she had no idea that she was stepping onto another battlefield.

Highfill quickly proved to be an excellent teacher. Her specialty was preparing students for Advanced Placement classes in high school, which can earn students college credit. In 2005, she was selected as codirector of the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project at the University of Arkansas, a local affiliate of an international writing program that attracts some of the world’s best teachers. In 2011, the Arkansas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts named her Middle School English Teacher of the Year. In the 2011–12 school year, 77 percent of her students scored “advanced” on state tests.¹ That’s an amazing success rate. Typically, no more than one-quarter of students score “advanced” on state English tests, even the less rigorous ones.

Highfill’s eighth graders learned about comedy and political satire from James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” They read Arthurian legends, poems by Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. They learned about internal dialogue, quest literature, parody, and symbolism. Highfill’s guide for choosing assignments was Henry David Thoreau’s maxim, “Read the best books first, or you might not have a chance to read them at all.”²

When Arkansas signed on to the Common Core curriculum mandates in 2010 — to be followed later by national tests to enforce them — Highfill joined the committee her school convened to decide how to put the mandates into place. Schools across the country created similar committees.

In the era of “education accountability,” curriculum mandates spell out the learning requirements that annual tests assess. The national Common Core tests measure only reading and math to fulfill the federal mandates, but Common Core actually asserts authority over the entire curriculum, since its English mandates also apply to “literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects.”³ A series of grant competitions and executive rewrites of federal education law during the first year of the Obama presidency ensured that Common Core would determine far more than what teachers hand to children in the classroom. The administration required schools to use Common Core test results in evaluating, ranking, hiring, firing, and even redistributing teachers, and required states to use the results to judge and rank schools and even to take them over from local authorities.

Unlike most teachers, Highfill had paid attention to how Common Core became her boss. When she got a look at the mandates, she was dismayed at what they would do to the extraordinarily rich lessons she had been providing her students.

In language arts, Common Core explicitly requires schools to give “much greater attention to a specific category of informational text — literary nonfiction — than has been traditional.” A graph included in the standards document shows an increasing nonfiction intake through the school years: 50 percent in fourth grade, 55 percent in eighth grade, 70 percent in twelfth grade.⁴ This requirement alarmed Highfill, who had achieved great success with her students by feeding them a diet replete with poetry and short stories and classic novels.

“Where is the research that proves more nonfiction is better for students?” she asked. “What about inferencing skills that you only get with fiction and poetry? That was my whole issue: please, tell me where the research says this is better for kids.” Indeed, research indicates that students’ experience with high-quality fiction is a major predictor of their college success, while it finds nothing of the kind for nonfiction.⁵

Highfill expressed her concerns to some colleagues. When administrators asked teachers what they thought about Common Core, Highfill and others began pointing out its flaws, but the principal said, “You guys are being too negative.” The administration, said Highfill, “wanted us to accept the document lock, stock, and barrel.”

She had to toss out six weeks’ worth of poetry lessons and a favorite unit on Arthurian legends to make way for light nonfiction (but not always scientifically accurate) reading, such as a chapter from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.⁶ And she could no longer select her own reading assignments. The school had hired a curriculum consultant who, like all of Common Core’s main authors, had no experience in English teaching or research. This consultant required teachers to reorganize their curriculum around vague nonliterary themes such as “how the world affects our decision to do the right thing.”⁷

“We’d all bring our [lesson] ideas, and the consultant would consistently say, ‘You can’t use that, it’s not the Lexile level,’” Highfill recalled. “So eventually people stopped suggesting things” and resigned themselves to following the consultant’s “suggestions.”

Hold it — what on earth is a “Lexile level”? Well, Common Core requires that students read books at or slightly above their grade level, and it recommends using algorithms to determine those levels. The Lexile Framework is a computer program that runs such algorithms. The Common Core document even shows which Lexile levels correspond to which Common Core grade levels.⁸ The problem with these computerized measurements of readability is that they routinely make silly mistakes. The Lexile Framework rates The Grapes of Wrath, for instance, as a second-grade book.⁹ Computers can judge things like vocabulary and sentence length, but not the more abstract qualities of literature such as irony, syntax, and metaphor.

Highfill began expressing her frustrations on the widely read blog of Diane Ravitch, a historian of education. She also talked to a Washington Post reporter, Lyndsey Layton, in December 2012. “With informational text, there isn’t that human connection that you get with literature,” she told Layton. “And the kids are shutting down. They’re getting bored. I’m seeing more behavior problems in my classroom than I’ve ever seen.”¹⁰

That Post article was one of the first in a mainstream publication to include criticism of Common Core. It went viral.

Within weeks, Highfill found herself in the principal’s office. The ostensible complaint was that her students’ writing on Common Core practice tests was “too good.” Yes, really. The testing machines could not rate their essays because the writing was too complex — like the high-quality literature Highfill gave her students. Apparently, eliciting excellent student work was now “professional insubordination.” Highfill said the principal told her, “This cannot happen again,” then required her to complete an “improvement plan,” which included a ban on talking to the media. This plan also brought in a district administrator to sit in the back of her class every week and to review every lesson plan from that point forward.

When I contacted Highfill for an interview soon after her remarks appeared in the Washington Post, she wanted first to review with her union representative whether she had any speech protections in her contract that would allow her to give the interview without imperiling her job. After a few weeks, she decided it didn’t matter. She was quitting.

“It’s not just happening to me, it’s happening everywhere,” Highfill said, speaking in a rush of heartfelt frustration, “and it’s happening to good teachers. They’re being given ultimatums to stop talking, stop becoming activists.”

She’s right. This is happening across the country, and it means that millions of American children are losing out on some world-class instruction, even as pundits once again raise alarms about the nation’s academic mediocrity. The teachers who stick it out are being forced to feed their students mental junk food, according to some of the country’s top academics and researchers. Since the mandates were published in 2010, scholars in psychology, child development, education, mathematics, and literature have come out with a variety of substantive criticisms, most prominently in dozens of studies published by Boston’s Pioneer Institute. Another report, published in 2015, concluded that “Common Core reading requirements for kindergarten are inappropriate and not well-grounded in research,” and are likely to set children back academically.¹¹ It recommended immediately yanking Common Core’s kindergarten standards.

A literacy researcher who helped write Common Core, Dr. Louisa Moats, sharply criticized the final product in 2014, saying, “We drafted sections on Language and Writing Foundations that were not incorporated into the document as originally drafted.” She continued:

Classroom teachers are confused, lacking in training and skills to implement the standards, overstressed, and the victims of misinformed directives from administrators who are not well grounded in reading research. I’m beginning to get messages from very frustrated educators who threw out what was working in favor of a new “CCSS aligned” program, and now find that they don’t have the tools to teach kids how to read and write.¹²

Why didn’t the critics speak out earlier, when their input could have improved the final product, or deep-sixed it? Because there was no public discussion of Common Core before the education-industrial complex pushed states into this ill-considered scheme. Teachers are now left to deal with the mess that credentialed “experts” with no classroom experience have made — unless they decide that dealing with it is not worth the trouble.

Highfill had an easier out than some: she got married in the summer of 2013 and moved to Virginia. So a top-notch teacher and Navy veteran left the field after eleven years. “I miss being in the classroom,” she said a few weeks before her wedding. “I miss watching their eyes glow when they get excited about learning. So I don’t think I’m going to be out of the classroom for a long time. But after last year I felt like a break was in order. I’m hoping that by the time I go back all of this Common Core nonsense will be gone. This is a behemoth.”

Unfortunately, if Highfill waits until Common Core disappears, she will have to wait a long time. Despite swelling opposition from parents and teachers across the country, it remains embedded in almost every classroom in America. It even affects the four states that didn’t adopt the mandates when Common Core steamrolled the country in 2010 — Virginia, Nebraska, Texas, and Alaska. It sounds like a national curriculum, doesn’t it? But that’s illegal. So how did it come about?

The “State-Led” Façade

In the “Myths and Facts” section of the initiative’s website, we read that “Common Core is a state-led effort that is not part of No Child Left Behind or any other federal initiative. The federal government played no role in the development of the Common Core.”¹³ The U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan, used the “state-led” argument in various public statements, including a major speech defending Common Core before a convention of journalists in 2013.¹⁴ It was crucial for Common Core’s creators that it not technically be a federal project, although the federal government has been funding curriculum models and overseeing state tests for decades.¹⁵ Yes, it has, even though the U.S. Constitution gives no powers over education to the federal government, and even though the three major federal education laws that define the currently existing, extraconstitutional federal role in education explicitly prohibit federal meddling in curriculum or test content.¹⁶

The laws are this way because Americans have consistently objected to federal control over what children learn. According to the 2014 PDK/Gallup poll on public attitudes about education, 84 percent of Americans say that states or local school boards, not the federal government, “should have the greatest influence in deciding what is taught” in local schools.¹⁷ The poll questions changed slightly in a 2015 follow-up, which still showed that “Only one in five Americans believe the federal government should play a role” in K–12 testing, curriculum, accountability, or funding.¹⁸ Common Core effectively means the opposite, which is a reason the 2015 poll found twice as many Americans against it as in favor. Opposition included majorities of whites, Hispanics, public-school parents, Republicans, and independents.¹⁹

Aware of Americans’ strong preference for local control of education, Common Core’s originators ran it through a series of private nonprofit organizations, trying at the same time to make the project appear “stateled.” In so doing, they followed the nationalization strategy a Brookings Institution paper recommended in 2000.²⁰ The paper describes attempts by big government and big business to nationalize and standardize American education during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly with the Goals 2000: Educate America Act of 1994. The law provided for a national council to review and approve state curriculum guidelines in all grades and subjects, but the specter of a “national school board” became a political issue in the 1994 election season. A set of federally sponsored history standards drew widespread public criticism, leading to a 99–1 Senate resolution opposing their certification. Consequently, the council to approve state standards never materialized.

To get around those pesky American rubes and their antiquated ideas about individual liberty and local authority, the Brookings paper suggested a backdoor approach: nonprofit organizations could “assert a national interest in education without having to defend themselves against the charge of wanting to become a national school board.”²¹ Accordingly, the Common Core project was led by a collection of private lobbying groups, with a handful of public officials adding their names, including a few former governors: James Hunt (North Carolina), Richard Riley (South Carolina), and Bob Wise (West Virginia).²² At most, only a minuscule fraction of the nation’s elected state officials had a part in developing this “state-led” initiative.

Common Core grew under the radar, then, making almost no news until it was a done deal. While media outlets of all sizes and audiences were giving copious attention to the Obamacare debate that raged in summer 2010, they published close to nothing about the education mandates that came out around the same time. The backlash took a few years to swell because people can’t protest what they don’t know is coming.

I first heard about Common Core in fall 2012 from Heather Crossin, the Indianapolis mother we met in the prologue who objected to the convoluted math her daughter was being taught. Then I started trying to figure out who exactly made it, and by what process. I contacted every major organization that was openly named as having a hand in it, as well as several dozen of the individuals listed as contributors on Common Core documents. Nearly all refused an interview; others simply ignored my repeated emails and phone calls.

A Gates-Led Scheme

Once Common Core had actually become news, and four years after it gained control of American education, three top Core-pushers sought a Washington Post interview.²³ This is a common public relations technique for trying to contain negative press, which at that point was increasing rapidly: Reach out to a friendly reporter and offer an exclusive interview where you “reveal” your side of the story. The interviewees carefully prep their tale. It’s called “staying on message” and “controlling the narrative.”

The Post article that appeared in June 2014 featured Bill Gates, whose foundation funded almost the entire project; David Coleman, one of Common Core’s five “lead writers,” dubbed “the architect of Common Core” by media outlets; and Gene Wilhoit, who served as president of the Council of Chief State School Officers while it midwifed Common Core. CCSSO is a private networking and lobbying organization that has pushed national curriculum mandates for decades and was explicitly named as a potential vehicle for national standards in the Brookings paper cited above.

“One summer day in 2008,” the Post reported, Coleman and Wilhoit visited the Gates Foundation’s massive Seattle compound of glass-encased, V-shaped offices. It’s only logical they went to Gates. The three biggest education grant makers are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. Gates is by far the largest. In total assets, Walton has $1.7 billion,²⁴ Broad, $2.2 billion,²⁵ and Gates, $37 billion,²⁶ according to public tax documents.

Coleman and Wilhoit pushed Gates to bankroll Common Core, citing the high remediation rates for U.S. college freshmen and the need for nationally interchangeable K–12 curriculum. A poor K–12 system drags down the economy, they noted. A few weeks later, Wilhoit told the Post, Gates called and said he was in.

And how. Gates’s foundation, the richest in the world, gave CCSSO an initial $10 million grant to have people write Common Core, and began sending millions of dollars to every conceivable organization in the United States to grease the skids. Gates paid to have lobbyists prod lawmakers to adopt Common Core, to help teachers unions write curriculum and coordinate public relations campaigns, to have researchers compare Common Core with existing state curriculum standards (and, unsurprisingly, pronounce the former superior) — you name a Common Core component, Gates paid for it.

The Gates Foundation has given millions to state and federal departments of education, and to national teachers unions. It has spent hundreds of thousands to “assist state education agencies in tying teacher evaluations to Common Core.” It has spent millions to sponsor forums where advocacy groups have lobbied governors, state school board members, state lawmakers, local school board members, business leaders, teachers, military representatives, and other key groups to accept and promote Common Core. It has given millions toward developing “parent advocacy training modules.”

From 2009 to June 2016, the Gates Foundation dished out $384,605,464 in Common Core–related grants. The greater part of it, some $269 million, went to public relations efforts, such as training teachers to go on camera for TV ads, and gathering lawmakers in posh locales to explain how wonderful Common Core will be for the nation.²⁷ Two years after that 2008 meeting in Seattle between Gates, Coleman, and Wilhoit, forty-five states and the District of Columbia had accepted Common Core, to nearly no public fanfare. Wyoming signed on the following year, bringing the total to forty-six states.

“Without the Gates money, we wouldn’t have been able to do this,” said Kentucky’s education commissioner, Terry Holliday, to the Post. Holliday was on CCSSO’s board of directors while it facilitated Common Core, and subsequently became its president. And he wasn’t kidding about the Gates money. But throwing money at everything labeled “Common Core” was only a part of Gates’s influence peddling, which has since sparked debate among wonks and watchdogs over whether some of its activities served as a cloak for government actions and amounted to tax-free, disclosure-free lobbying.

Over the years, the Gates Foundation has steadily increased its grants for education, particularly for advocacy, said Sarah Reckhow, a political science professor at Michigan State University who has studied education philanthropists. She calculated that 20 percent of its education grants went to advocacy in 2010, while its grants to schools had dropped from 50 percent in 2005 to 25 percent.²⁸ A quarter of education spending by the Gates and Broad foundations in 2010 went to nationwide advocacy of Common Core, Reckhow later found.²⁹ The same trend has been noted in education philanthropy generally: large education foundations such as Gates, Broad, and Walton have moved from sponsoring local charity to sponsoring political activism.³⁰ The reason is that in a centralized system it’s easier to influence the few people who have power than to convince the public at large to go along with one group’s agenda.

Philanthropists “don’t have an obvious constituency,” Reckhow observed. “Teachers unions represent teachers. Who does the Gates Foundation represent?”

Manufacturing Consensus

The Gates Foundation confirmed but did not return my repeated calls and emails requesting comment on their role in developing and promoting Common Core, but employees have granted other interviews. After all, “systemic changes” require advocacy, as Allan Golston, president of Gates’s U.S. program, told the New York Times in 2011. Gates funds myriad seemingly grassroots education groups, the Times article noted.³¹ An academic study Reckhow coauthored with Megan Tompkins-Stange in 2014 that includes anonymous interviews with Gates employees found this was a deliberate strategy to build an ersatz grassroots movement. “All of these organizations suddenly singing from the same hymnbook are all getting money from the same organization,” one Gates official said, adding, “we fund almost everyone who does advocacy.”³²

Gates funds advocacy not just to influence lawmakers directly, but also to influence the groups that influence lawmakers, thereby creating a kind of echo chamber, a Gates employee explained. An organization with the size and resources of Gates “can make grants to lots of organizations to promote a certain message not just . . . with government but also with business and with the public.”³³

This kind of manufactured “consensus,” disguised as a grassroots movement, muddied the waters for local elected officials when they deliberated over education policy. Take, for example, a January 2013 legislative hearing in Indiana, which would become the first state to repeal Common Core. Among the thirty-two people who testified against the repeal, twenty-six were members of organizations that received money from the Gates Foundation. That’s more than three-quarters of the anti-repeal voices. Gates also funded Common Core proponents who came out in force to oppose a repeal bill in Georgia in 2014.³⁴ I witnessed the same pattern myself when testifying against Common Core in 2014 hearings on similar bills in Wisconsin and Tennessee.

“Gates has a sort of magnetic force” to attract media attention, as well as other donors and politicians, said Reckhow in an interview, noting also “the single-mindedness with which they pursue an agenda.” Gates can “crowd out” other interests with its vast resources and elevate its priorities over those of the public at large, in part by creating echo chambers and by hosting fancy events with big-name attendees to buy favor with public officials.

Gates knows it. Buying political influence is a deliberate strategy. “Starting with the governors,” one foundation official explained, “we’ve got to build support at the state level, and once we build support at the state level, then when the dynamics are right, which would have been 2008, and we get an administration — more importantly, an education secretary whose school district benefited from our support — then you’ve got the ability to drive forward and push it off-balance at the federal level.”³⁵ (We’ll return to the point about the education secretary later on.)

The effectiveness of this strategy actually surprised foundation leaders, an insider told Reckhow: “We have this enormous power to sway the public conversations about things like effective teaching or standards and mobilizing lots of resources in their favor without real robust debate. . . . I mean, it’s striking to me, really.”³⁶

In her book Follow the Money (2012), Reckhow suggests that foundation grants are most effective when they support existing local activity, rather than impose outside agendas. The Gates Foundation has instead worked hand in glove with the U.S. Department of Education to “push down into states and localities the consensus they have already arrived at” on policies entangled with Common Core, said Jay Greene, a libertarian-leaning researcher who runs the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

Another critic, Kevin Welner, who directs the left-leaning National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, doesn’t mind Gates’s efforts to influence education policy, but he is concerned about balancing its influence. “I’d like others — particularly [in] the communities that are impacted by the most high-profile school policies — to have at least an equal voice to those from the outside,” he said in an email.

Concern over nonprofit activity in politics is bipartisan and has grown considerably since Common Core became national policy. Of the four most prominent education foundations, Gates has taken the most criticism, according to a study by Michael McShane and Jenn Hatfield for the American Enterprise Institute. They note that criticism of education philanthropy has been coming from the left for many years, but “it was really the Common Core that brought the right flank of journalists and activists into the fight against education philanthropy and helped the pushback swell to its current levels.”³⁷

McShane and Hatfield also found that news coverage of education philanthropy has remained mostly positive. In this connection, it’s important to point out that the Gates Foundation gives millions of dollars to major news outlets to cover education. Beneficiaries include the industry flagship Education Week ($9,981,027 so far), which has received several grants specifically for reporting on Common Core;³⁸ the Education Writers Association ($5,164,437);³⁹ EdSource, an education blog ($3,647,354);⁴⁰ Chalkbeat, an education news website ($797,444);⁴¹ the Hechinger Report, a prominent education outlet;⁴² and the Atlantic’s education reporting ($307,505 in 2015).⁴³

Foundations often fund both research and activism, according to Scott Thomas, dean of Claremont Graduate University’s education school. “It’s the way [Gates is] doing it that we think is curious. It’s an intrusion into the public sphere more directly that has not been seen before. They’re jumping into the policy process itself. That’s an interesting position, for a nonprofit to be involved in things that look a lot like lobbying.”

It is flatly illegal for nonprofit, 501(c)3 organizations, including the Gates Foundation,⁴⁴ to lobby public officials or engage in other direct political activity, such as endorsing candidates. People and organizations that do lobby public officials are subject to heavy federal and state regulations and disclosure rules that nonprofits are not. Nonprofits found or suspected to have violated their tax status may face IRS investigation and prosecution. The Obama IRS has found time to harass smalltime, conservative-minded nonprofit groups — leading to several years of congressional and Justice Department investigation of IRS activity — but apparently it has not had time to check into the Gates Foundation, despite weighty evidence that this massive private organization essentially directed U.S. education policy. Doing so would mean acknowledging that the administration has participated in what could at best be called ethically dubious behavior.

Reckhow labels big education foundations a “shadow bureaucracy” whose activities in crafting and advocating for education policies cloak the process from ordinary citizens. This is what bothers Alisa Ellis, a Utah mother and grassroots leader known nationally for her criticism of Common Core. Because the standards and tests were incubated in nonprofit organizations, citizens can’t find out who makes decisions, what organizations they’re working with, what information they take into account, or how much anything costs, as they can when state boards of education or legislatures make policy, Ellis said, because open-records laws do not apply to ostensibly private organizations. In Arkansas, Common Core became law only because “private foundations are making decisions that would normally be left up to a public institution that would be accountable to the taxpayers,” said Betty Peters, a member of the state school board.

“I don’t think many people will quibble the good intentions of these foundations,” said Thomas, “but that they subvert the basic democratic processes designed to help encourage liberty and equality is what we should be concerned about.”

The Shadow Bureaucracy

After Gates agreed to pay for Common Core and its gravy train, the political stars aligned for the foundation to become part of a shadow bureaucracy within the federal government when the Obama administration came to office a few months later. One reason for the foundation’s previous resistance to getting involved in federal policy was distaste for the George W. Bush administration. A Gates employee told Reckhow, “Particularly back in the day when people didn’t like the Bush administration . . . all federal politics for people in Seattle looked like doing stuff with the Bush administration.” Another employee described the shift that occurred with the election of Barack Obama: “It was much more legitimate to be involved with policy post-2008 with Obama.”⁴⁵

This post-2008 posture is directly contrary to Bill Gates’s presentation of himself and his foundation’s work as apolitical. In the Washington Post interview in 2014,

Gates grew irritated . . . when the political backlash against the standards was mentioned. “These are not political things,” he said. “These are where people are trying to apply expertise to say, ‘Is this a way of making education better?’ At the end of the day, I don’t think wanting education to be better is a right-wing or left-wing thing.”⁴⁶

If Gates meant what he said — despite contradicting his own employees — he was wrong. It’s impossible to be apolitical regarding public education, which is, after all, established by political institutions known as states and funded politically by taxpayers through state force. (If you don’t pay the taxes that fund public schools, ultimately you get jailed.) The idea of nonpartisan or apolitical decisions in public policy is a progressive notion that goes back at least to Woodrow Wilson, whose ideal government would consist largely of unelected “experts” who managed everyone else’s lives for them, untainted by political concerns — i.e., the will of the people.

Whether it’s even possible for anyone to make unbiased “expert” decisions in anything is an old debate. But here’s why Gates’s “not political” claim about his education activism is an inherently political statement: Conservatives generally favor local control of education because they believe that people tend to abuse power and that good government therefore disperses power and sets limits on it. Progressives are more likely to believe that power doesn’t necessarily corrupt, so they are more comfortable with government officials amassing and centralizing power, with advice from “experts” of their choosing. Thus, to insist that unfurling Common Core across the nation isn’t a political matter is itself an expression of a progressive political viewpoint.

Moreover, Common Core’s originators gleefully employed political muscle to spread their agenda nationwide. Because the Gates Foundation saw the Obama administration to be in sync with its own educational vision, four Gates employees went to work in the new administration in 2009. The two who headed to the Department of Education violated the administration’s conflict-of-interest policy banning lobbyists from becoming high-ranking federal employees.⁴⁷ While interviewing Gates employees, Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange heard “several informants” mention that a number of the education secretary’s staff appointments

were either former Gates officials or former Gates grantees. One informant noted that, “Once Obama was elected, I mean, Gates literally had people sitting at the Department of Education, both formally and informally.” These officials included Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement and former program director of the education program at Gates, and Joanne Weiss, director of the Race to the Top competition and a former partner at the NewSchools Venture Fund, a major Gates grantee that served as an intermediary funder for charter school management organizations.⁴⁸

The new education secretary himself, Arne Duncan, also had Gates connections in his background (as alluded to earlier): while Duncan headed the Chicago Public Schools, the district received more than $47 million from the Gates Foundation.⁴⁹ Gates officials told Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange that Duncan was “a linchpin in the partnership between Gates and federal policymakers.”⁵⁰ Duncan’s chief of staff, Margot Rogers, was one of the former Gates employees who needed a conflict-of-interest waiver to join the administration.⁵¹ The relationship between the two organizations was so close that Gates staff had regular phone conversations with Duncan and Shelton while the latter ostensibly worked for taxpayers.⁵²

This cabal of former Gates employees and grant recipients basically walked into the White House with Obama, ready to implement the education plan that the foundation, along with employees of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), had drafted beforehand. Between Coleman and Wilhoit’s conversation with Gates in the summer of 2008 and the day that Obama assumed the presidency, the Gates Foundation cosponsored a paper titled “Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-Class Education.” Written by employees of the three organizations that would go on to construct Common Core — CCSSO, the National Governors Association (NGA), and a nonprofit called Achieve, Inc. — the paper envisioned how the federal government could establish a national curriculum and tests (notwithstanding the legal prohibition). Federal policymakers “should offer funds to help underwrite the cost for states” to implement “a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts,” with new curriculum, assessments, teacher training, and other resources.⁵³ The paper refered to this effort as the “Common State Standards Initiative.”⁵⁴

The Obama administration ultimately didn’t have to offer funding for Common Core to be written. Gates paid for that. Instead, the administration ponied up the one thing the federal government is uniquely qualified to provide: pressure, verging on coercion. Before we get to federal force-feeding, however, let’s spend a little time talking about the chefs who made this meal of worms. They, too, are part of the shadow bureaucracy.

“Outsourcing a Core State Function”

Who called the shots during the obscure process that brought Common Core into the world? We don’t know. As Alisa Ellis noted, the organizations that wrote and pushed Common Core, funded primarily with Gates money, are private and have no obligation to submit to open-records requests or hold public meetings, as state boards of education must do. No one inside NGA, CCSSO, or Achieve is elected by and accountable to voters and taxpayers. And these organizations have been remarkably unresponsive to requests for more information about the document that is up-ending U.S. education.

This is astonishing, not just because Americans are granted by law and tradition the right to govern our own affairs, but also because Common Core exercises so much power over a $620 billion industry that is mostly financed by taxes. The cost of implementing Common Core itself, according to one of the few estimates made, was between $5 and $12 billion.⁵⁵ That estimate was made by a Gates-financed organization and reflected its “middle-of-the-road” assessment. The only independent estimate of Common Core’s costs nationwide concluded that its roll-out would stick taxpayers with a bill of $16 billion over and above existing tax support for education.⁵⁶ Gates assumed the right to direct between $5 billion and $16 billion in tax dollars with very little deliberation on the matter by elected officials in public forums created for that purpose. (Has he ever heard of “No taxation without representation”?)

Common Core was not “written by local school districts,” as Ohio’s governor and erstwhile presidential candidate, John Kasich, incorrectly told a Cleveland radio audience.⁵⁷ The National Governors Association seems to have been the primary initiator of Common Core, with CCSSO and Achieve doing more of the hands-on work. To use a metaphor, NGA was the Mafia don and the other two its henchmen. A 2013 paper by Dane Linn of NGA, titled “Governors and the Common Core,” reinforces this educated guess.⁵⁸

Taxpayers have some claim on the activities of NGA, CCSSO, and Achieve, not just because of these organizations’ outsized influence on public policy, but also because taxpayers help fund the organizations directly. That’s right: American taxpayers financially support meetings they cannot attend, where decisions they cannot influence are made about how their tax dollars are spent and how their children are educated.

NGA and CCSSO are basically clubby interest groups for governors and state superintendents, respectively, but states pay dues to belong, said Emmett McGroarty, director of the American Principles Project’s education division. NGA would not release information on member dues to APP, he said. CCSSO did give a generic membership cost, but not what is paid by specific states, a sum that varies.

NGA’s spokeswoman would only say, “we consider all governors members of the association,” but at least five governors in office during the years of Common Core’s emergence and implementation withdrew (or had already withdrawn) their membership publicly and refused to pay dues: those of Florida, Maine, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Texas, all Republicans. Spokesmen for those governors said NGA membership provided too little benefit for the money.

Former governor Rick Perry of Texas withdrew membership in 2003. In 2014 his spokesman Josh Havens said the state’s NGA dues had been running $125,000 to $150,000 per year, and the governor “didn’t feel that active membership was a smart use of taxpayer funds.” Idaho suspended its membership in 2009 for financial reasons, but resumed paying about $40,000 for membership (plus $30,000 for travel to meetings) in 2013, said Jon Hanian, a spokesman for Governor Butch Otter. He explained that the governor “believes states are the laboratory of the republic” and “values sharing his experience as well as sharing the experience of other governors as he crafts public policy.”

When Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, pulled out of NGA in 2012, he told the Bangor Daily News, “I get no value out of those meetings. They are too politically correct and everybody is lovey-dovey and no decisions are ever made.”⁵⁹ NGA’s communications director told the paper that governors cannot choose to leave; they are all NGA members even if they don’t pay dues. That raises the question why states pay dues at all.

In any case, 38 percent of NGA’s revenue comes from taxpayers, according to its 2014 financial report.⁶⁰ In 2013–14, NGA’s $25.8 million in total revenue included $5.3 million from the feds, $4.5 million from states, $7.9 million from private foundations, and another $2.3 million from corporate sponsors.⁶¹ This has been its general pattern of income distribution for years. In the fiscal year during which Common Core was created, tax dollars provided 50 percent of NGA’s revenue.⁶² A spokeswoman for NGA referred questions about cash flow to NGA’s communications director; neither of the two responded to several follow-up calls and emails.

NGA offers businesses and advocacy groups access to governors at its semiannual meetings. As governor of Virginia, George Allen attended the meetings largely to recruit IBM into his state, but he said the organization “didn’t have much of an impact on my decisions as governor. . . . Not saying it’s a bad organization, but we had our own agenda.” At NGA meetings, governors play-act at making policy by voting on nonbinding resolutions to express shared priorities, said Allen, but “by the time they vote on a position,” the resolutions “get watered down so much any objections are already accommodated.” Moreover, NGA has no legal power to commit states to anything without the explicit consent of their legislatures. Yet it obviously has de facto power to influence states, as we’ll see.

NGA’s counterpart for state superintendents is CCSSO, which makes money partly by charging states to participate in a variety of committees. Membership in each committee costs $16,000 per year per state, and states can participate in several. Indiana, for example, participated in the math and social studies committees in 2012, said Adam Baker, spokesman for the Indiana Department of Education. CCSSO reported $2.5 million in revenue from membership dues in 2014.⁶³

CCSSO also receives millions from the federal government. “Approximately 13% and 33% of the Council’s revenue and 25% and 34% of accounts receivable were provided by U.S. Department of Education grants or contracts for fiscal years 2011 and 2010, respectively,” according to the nonprofit’s 2010–11 financial statement.⁶⁴ In 2011, CCSSO received $558,000 from the 2009 stimulus bill for working with one of the two federally funded networks that created national Common Core tests. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education granted those two networks $330 million in stimulus funds. Since Common Core and its tests were released, federal funding as a percentage of CCSSO’s revenue has declined to single digits, but the organization still received $1.8 million in federal dollars in 2014.⁶⁵

Heather Crossin heard that CCSSO would be meeting in her hometown of Indianapolis in October 2012 to discuss national social studies mandates as a follow-up to Common Core. She called Michele Parks, a CCSSO meeting planner, and asked if she could attend. Crossin wanted to know what state officials were planning to do to her children with her money. Parks told her she could not attend the meeting. Crossin asked who was on the writing team for the social studies standards, and was told the information “was not available for public release.”

According to the organization’s meeting webpage, “the Council of Chief State School Officers holds over one hundred meetings per year. CCSSO meetings are closed to the public and attendance is by invitation only unless otherwise denoted” (emphasis in the original).⁶⁶

Over a period of ten weeks, I sent dozens of emails and made numerous phone calls to at least six CCSSO spokesmen and personnel asking for access to the Indianapolis meeting or any others. At last, I got an email from Kate Dando in December 2012, long after the meeting had passed, saying: “our meetings/sessions at our meetings are open to press really on a case by case basis,” and adding that a few reporters have attended CCSSO meetings, usually on background, which means they cannot directly quote what they hear.

Why not? “It’s going to be reported that X state said this about their progress,” said Carrie Heath Phillips, CCSSO’s Common Core director. “When they have those conversations, we keep that protected, but it depends on the meeting and topic.” In other words, public officials are scared to tell the public how well they are managing public resources, and CCSSO provides them private forums to relieve that anxiety. How comforting — for everyone except parents and taxpayers.

Somehow, those two unauthoritative networking forums of governors and state superintendents became serious drivers of education policy for the nation, along with Achieve, which describes itself as “an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization.”⁶⁷ This third member of the triumvirate has benefited greatly from shepherding Common Core: it received a $186 million federal grant to run one of the two national Common Core test organizations, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). There’s some job security. Achieve continues to receive public money because states contract with it for Common Core tests. Its public tax filing for 2012 shows that these tests raked in $4,830,044 for Achieve that year.⁶⁸

Although we don’t know what the people who actually wrote Common Core earned for doing so, the leaders of all its parent organizations have been generously compensated. Michael Cohen had a salary of $311,602 as Achieve’s president in 2012.⁶⁹ Wilhoit, the fellow who with Coleman had convinced Gates to put his money behind Common Core, made $349,615 in 2011, his last full year with CCSSO.⁷⁰ Dane Linn, who directly oversaw the creation of Common Core when he worked for NGA as its education director, got a salary of $222,122 from NGA in 2010.⁷¹ These are comfortable incomes, easily outpacing the pay of most governors, and taxpayer money helped pad them.

In “Governors and the Common Core,” Linn wrote, “In my 16 years as director of NGA’s education division, I have spearheaded many national initiatives for the organization; few people have had the opportunity to influence state policy the way that I have over this time.”⁷² How jolly for him. But who elected Linn to “influence state policy”?

NGA has not released what resolution, if any, the governors voted on in 2009 to authorize its subsequent work to develop and promote Common Core. A researcher in Kentucky managed to get a copy of the “memorandum of agreement” that governors signed to kick off the project — not from NGA or CCSSO, but from the Kentucky Department of Education.⁷³ Signed copies of this memorandum are nestled among the thousands of pages (often deep within unsearchable PDFs) that states submitted to the Obama administration to win education grants from funds supplied in the 2009 stimulus bill, for reasons to be explained.

States have historically created education standards in public meetings, with related documents also a matter of public record, noted Bill Allison, editorial director at the Sunlight Foundation, a public transparency watchdog. But the Common Core process was quite different. “What was behind those policies, what was considered, the different elements that went into them, the ideas that went into them — it’s a black box,” he said. “The public do have the right to know the laws that are going to affect them and their families, especially when they’re paying for them.”

Do governors have legal authority to overhaul K–12 policy in their states merely by signing a series of contracts with each other, with private organizations, and with the federal government? Does any private organization have legal authority to formulate state policy? No, and no. The only legal way to authorize “state-led” initiatives is through state legislatures, by constitutionally established processes.

With Common Core, that happened only after the fact, if it happened at all. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, in only four states did Common Core ever pass through the full state legislature. Almost everywhere else, it passed through the state board of education.⁷⁴ Only seven states have elected boards of education, while four have a mix of elected and appointed members.⁷⁵ So it was mostly unelected officials who locked states into an overhaul of education policy, with little to inform the public of what they were doing. But the real work of crafting the policy had been done by private organizations.

As Allison put it, “The state is outsourcing a core state function to an outside organization that is then outsourcing to other organizations, and you can’t have the parental and legislator input you normally should.” He added, “Education is the future, and I do think people have the right to know who is writing the curriculum.”

How NGA Conjured Up Common Core

The National Governors Association first brought governors directly into the project of nationalizing education standards in June 2008 when it cohosted an education forum with the Gates-funded Hunt Institute,⁷⁶ a project of the former North Carolina governor James Hunt Jr. In September that year, NGA announced it was joining with CCSSO and Achieve to “promote international benchmarking of U.S. education performance.”⁷⁷ The following December, the triumvirate released the “Benchmarking for Success” report calling for national curriculum mandates and tests, and recommending “a strong state-federal partnership” to accomplish that goal.

This chronology demonstrates that Common Core’s originators requested federal backing before the project had a name, contrary to their later insistence that the initiative was independent of the federal government. Linn’s paper reveals that “[Obama] administration officials were regularly updated about the effort to develop common standards,” although he stresses that “they played no role in developing, reviewing, or approving the standards.”⁷⁸ No role at all — if you don’t count the deep professional relationships, the regular phone calls, and the funding streams between the U.S. Department of Education, Gates, NGA, Achieve, and CCSSO.

Over the next few months, the nonprofit triumvirate set about to commission new education standards. No more than a handful of sitting elected officials are named as endorsing the project in the press releases from NGA and Hunt during that time. (NGA spokesmen refused requests for comment.) Most of the governors Linn named as influencing the process were former elected officials.

On June 1, 2009, NGA and CCSSO announced that forty-six states (along with three territories) had committed to “joining a state-led process to develop a common core of state standards,” but did not explain what “joining” entailed.⁷⁹ An education forum sponsored by NGA and the Hunt Institute two weeks later featured direct advocacy for national standards to twenty-one governors and their staff.⁸⁰ The organizations did not release the names of attendees at the invitation-only event.

At the forum, Secretary Duncan spoke of national education standards as a federal-state partnership. “[M]y job is to help you succeed” in adopting “common national standards,” he told the assembly.⁸¹ States had initiated Common Core, Duncan said, because a commission of fifteen people headed by two former governors and funded by the Gates Foundation had recommended national standards in 2007.⁸² The federal government “empowers states to decide what kids need to learn and how to measure it,” he noted, adding that one of the ways it would do so was by funding national tests. State-led, indeed!

By the beginning of July, NGA and CCSSO had formed more committees. There were two work groups, with a total of twenty-five members (four of whom sat in both committees), to write standards in math and in English. These twenty-five people included a few professors but no K–12 teachers. There were also two feedback committees to provide research and advice to the writers. The feedback groups together included thirty-three people (again, with four involved in both), mostly professors but with one middle school math teacher.⁸³ That’s only one K–12 classroom teacher out of nearly sixty people selected to write or advise on K–12 standards. In September, NGA announced a “validation committee” whose job was to ensure that the standards were “research- and evidence-based,” as had been promised.⁸⁴ In addition, says Linn, six states formed their own committees of teachers to send comments on drafts to the NGA/CCSSO committees.

According to Mark Bauerlein, an Emory University professor who sat on a feedback committee, the lead writers were David Coleman and Susan Pimentel in English, and Jason Zimba, Phil Daro, and William McCallum in math. Linn points to Coleman and Zimba as the top dogs for what went into the English and math sections, respectively,⁸⁵ and neither of them had previous experience writing education standards. None of these five lead writers had ever been a K–12 teacher before being appointed to tell K–12 teachers across the nation how to do their jobs. For some reason, that apparently mattered little to whoever hired them.

The writing process and surrounding discussions were sealed by confidentiality agreements. Feedback committee members weren’t sure what effect their advice had, said Bauerlein. “I have no idea how much influence committee members had on the final product. Some of the things I advised made their way into the standards. Some of them didn’t. I’m not sure why or how,” he said.

Several people on the validation committee said the same: they had no idea what happened to the comments they submitted. James Milgram, a Stanford University professor who sat on the validation committee, described how the “facilitators” for the committee meeting “were virtually impossible to deal with.” In an email, he explained, “The facilitators were emphatically trying to not let us act according to our charter, but simply sign or not sign a [final approval] letter when the charter said we had final say over the quality of the final [Common Core] and could revise or rewrite it if we deemed it necessary.”

Milgram was one of only two subject-matter experts on the validation committee, meaning the only ones with doctorates and field experience in their specific subjects — Milgram in math, and Sandra Stotsky in English. Both had a large hand in writing the nation’s best academic standards, those of California and Massachusetts, respectively.

Five of the twenty-nine people on the validation committee refused to sign off on Common Core. Stotsky told me that she and several others had sent objections in writing to their NGA and CCSSO handlers. But the validation committee’s final report does not mention those objections.⁸⁶ Stotsky said the report’s author told her after it was completed that he had never received any written objections and would have included them if he had.

When government agencies solicit public comments on proposed policies, standard procedure is for the agency to publish all comments submitted and a response to each general line of criticism. This didn’t happen with Common Core.

Fed-Led Ed

Common Core supporters were able to piece together their creation behind the closed doors of private foundations, but no private organization could make anyone submit to it. A private foundation can bribe people, but not even Bill Gates could bribe every state to adopt his favored curriculum model. The federal government could bring muscle. Under the Obama administration, it did.

Proponents of Common Core know that Americans are generally wary of the federal government getting too close to education, so they use the “state-led” label almost obsessively when confronted with concerns about who brewed up the scheme and the extent of federal involvement in it. Prominent Core supporters have echoed the refrain everywhere their platforms have taken them in recent years. Bill Bennett, the Reagan-era education secretary, described Common Core in the Wall Street Journal as “a voluntary agreement among states.”⁸⁷ Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, opined in 2014 that the opposition to Common Core “has been mostly fueled by President Obama and his administration attempting to take credit for and co-opt a state-led initiative.”⁸⁸

So what do the advocates mean by “state-led”? Did an assembly of state officials sit down and write the national standards? Did state legislatures or boards of education initiate and carry out this project? No. Its creators and promoters included practically no elected officials. None of the governors who worked directly on the project were serving in office at the time of their involvement. Elected or even appointed state officials became formally involved only after Common Core appeared as a finished product.

Rather than “state-led,” it is far more accurate to call the initiative “special interest–led” or “Gates-led.” Common Core was developed within private organizations, in coordination with the Obama administration. It is true that governors and state superintendents signed a “memorandum of agreement” with NGA and CCSSO to kick off the development of Common Core, but that document itself contradicts the “state-led” talking point in two ways.

First, like the “Benchmarking for Success” report that NGA, CCSSO, and Achieve published in 2008, this memorandum explicitly requests federal involvement in Common Core, saying there is “an appropriate federal role in supporting this state-led effort.”⁸⁹ This role was expected to include funding the development of the Common Core standards and the corresponding national tests; giving states “incentives” to adopt the standards and restructure their education systems around them; giving states money to train teachers in Common Core and otherwise move it into place; and changing federal education laws to fit the experiment. The Obama administration subsequently did all these things.

Second, the agreement defines Common Core itself as a set of blueprints not just for curriculum, but also for national tests. Those tests are to enforce the curriculum mandates by measuring how well schools have instructed children in what the document demands. “High quality assessments go hand-in-hand with high quality instruction based on high quality standards. You cannot have one without the other,” said Laura Slover, CEO of PARCC, one of the Common Core testing organizations funded by the federal government. “The PARCC states see quality assessments as a part of instruction, not a break from instruction.”⁹⁰ The Obama administration not only provided the money to develop these tests, as NGA and CCSSO requested, but also directly supervised the process, as we will see.

In short, the federal government was closely involved in building Common Core, according to the initiative’s founding documents and leaders. To say otherwise is either the result of ignorance or an exercise in deception.

In 2009, the new Obama administration obliged NGA and CCSSO’s request for a “federal-state partnership” to “leverage” states into Common Core. Congress, in its wisdom, had granted the incoming education secretary a $4.35 billion slush fund in the stimulus bill. Duncan decided to turn that money into the grant competition he called Race to the Top (RTT). To get a slice of that pie, states had to explain how they would spend it. The Education Department judged state proposals according to four main criteria. One of these was that a state had adopted or committed itself to adopt “education standards common to a significant number of states.”

That definition, then as now, fits only Common Core. Indeed, the final regulations for RTT applications said “a State will earn ‘high’ points if its consortium [curriculum standards group] includes a majority of the States in the country; it will earn ‘medium’ or ‘low’ points if its consortium includes one-half or fewer of the States in the country.”⁹¹ Translation: Want to improve your chances of getting some of this money? Adopt Common Core, sight unseen.

Or as Joanne Weiss, who ran RTT as Duncan’s chief of staff, put it bluntly in a 2015 paper, “[W]e forced alignment among the top three education leaders in each participating state — the governor, the chief state school officer, and the president of the state board of education — by requiring each of them to sign their state’s Race to the Top application.”⁹² There’s that federal muscle.

In its 2014 retrospective on how all this happened — published four years after states had locked themselves into the scheme — the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration had actually written the words “Common Core” into its initial RTT grant requirements. But the straightforwardness of this language alarmed Wilhoit. “Those kinds of things cause people to be real suspicious,” he told the Post. So he got Weiss to delete the words “Common Core” in favor of the euphemism “college- and career-ready” standards.⁹³

States had one other option for fulfilling the “college- and career-ready” criterion. They could have all their higher education institutions certify that the state’s existing standards would graduate students ready for college with no need for remediation, something no high school diploma has ever certified. Doing so would either pull college down to the level of the average high school graduate or raise high school diploma requirements to a level most students would fail to reach. No state chose that option.

There was little time to do so, anyway. The U.S. Department of Education issued its Race to the Top guidelines on November 19, 2009.⁹⁴ The first deadline for states to return applications — which averaged three hundred pages in length, with an additional two hundred pages of appendices⁹⁵ — was January 19, 2010. The first draft of Common Core would not be released until March. Yet forty states and the District of Columbia submitted applications including pledges to adopt Common Core, whatever it was.⁹⁶ Merely applying for a federal grant functioned, in effect, as a contractual promise.

The Gates Foundation sent twenty-four states a total of $2.7 million to pay for consultants who helped write these applications,⁹⁷ which may explain why they all looked similar. So much for “competition.” Really, there was one competitor: the Gates Foundation. And it was competing on criteria it helped create. So it isn’t surprising that fourteen of the sixteen RTT-winning states had crafted their applications with the assistance of Gates-funded consultants.

“The Gates Foundation’s agenda has become the country’s agenda in education,” said Michael Petrilli, vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to the Puget Sound Business Journal in 2009.⁹⁸ Indeed, it has. But again, who elected Gates?

The second deadline for a shot at RTT money was June 1, 2010.⁹⁹ At least there was a draft of Common Core available by then, but the final edition would not be published until the following day. During this round of applications, thirty-five states and the District of Columbia renewed their promises to adopt Common Core.¹⁰⁰

These pledges were yet another reason Common Core went into effect years before voters or parents had any idea what was happening. States’ subsequent adoption of Common Core was just a formality. After the mandates were officially published on June 2, it took only thirty-five business days for a majority of states to issue the regulations locking themselves in.¹⁰¹

Tennessee was one of the first two RTT winners. Its state board of education unanimously rubberstamped Common Core on July 30, 2010, noting in its meeting minutes, “The verbatim adoption of these standards is required for Race to the Top approval.”¹⁰² Connecticut, the other initial winner, followed the same course of action, for the same reasons. The minutes for its state board meeting on July 7 likewise show unanimous approval of Common Core standards “in their entirety” as a mandatory follow-through on the state’s RTT promises.¹⁰³

The language of “verbatim adoption” and “in their entirety” is noteworthy because state officials who support Common Core now insist that states “can do as they please with the standards and make changes as they wish,” since they own the copyright, as the CCSSO director Chris Minnich told a reporter.¹⁰⁴ The copyright assertion has appeared in a number of state debates over a Common Core repeal. But it’s clear from original documents that states had to replace their curriculum mandates with Common Core in order to have a shot at RTT grants, a requirement that state officials clearly understood.

The Obama administration followed the RTT grant inducements with another Common Core ratchet. On September 23, 2011, Duncan unilaterally suspended the No Child Left Behind law (passed in 2001) in favor of direct contracts with states that met his personal education policy preferences, rather than complying with the law. It’s not clear this was legal. In fact, two of the top Department of Education lawyers from the George W. Bush administration argued that Bush’s signature law gave the secretary no such license.¹⁰⁵ But Duncan went ahead anyway, and congressional leaders did nothing about it except complain flaccidly.

The NCLB waivers lifted legally prescribed sanctions on low-performing schools — such as a possible takeover by a private management company — in exchange for an extralegal requirement that states essentially adopt Common Core. As with the RTT grants, the states could use “college- and career-ready standards” that were “common to a significant number of States,” or have state institutions of higher education certify a state’s standards on Common Core criteria.¹⁰⁶ Only one state, Minnesota, chose the second option in its initial waiver application. Forty-five states have applied, and all but two of them have received the waivers so far.¹⁰⁷ When Oklahoma repealed Common Core in 2014 and formed a committee to write a replacement, Duncan yanked its NCLB waiver until the state’s institutions of higher education quickly certified that Oklahoma’s previous curriculum mandates (which were being used in the interim) met federal requirements.

Nationalizing Tests

Still think Common Core was state-led? The federal government, as noted earlier, also funded and oversaw the development of the national tests that constitute the second half of the initiative. In 2010, the Obama administration provided four-year grants totaling $330 million to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), for the purpose of writing tests aligned with the Common Core curriculum.¹⁰⁸ In return for this largesse, the two organizations submitted to monthly and quarterly meetings and regular conference calls with U.S. Department of Education employees,¹⁰⁹ and to oversight by a specially appointed federal board that had access to and power over every aspect of the tests, down to the specific questions.¹¹⁰

PARCC and Smarter Balanced are not just testing organizations. Their grant agreements with the federal government reveal that they have directly written curriculum materials and models for classroom activities.

SBAC’s contract with the federal government said the consortium would provide “curriculum analysis tools, [and] professional development related to the new standards and assessments including support for educators to better understand the content of the new standards.”¹¹¹ Its grant application promised it would provide teachers with “exemplary instructional materials linked to CCSS [Common Core State Standards]”¹¹² and with “model curriculum and instructional modules that are aligned with the CCSS,” as well as training.¹¹³ It would send teachers “recommended readings, focused group discussions, use of online tools, and sharing of annotated examples of best practices and exercises.”¹¹⁴ The organization budgeted $5.125 million in federal funds to contract with yet another organization to develop such “instructional and curriculum resources for educators.”¹¹⁵

PARCC’s federal contract said it would distribute sample test items that “model the kinds of activities and assignments that teachers should incorporate into their classrooms throughout the year.”¹¹⁶ The contract included plans for PARCC to create an online resource with curriculum frameworks for teachers to use in lesson planning.¹¹⁷ PARCC would also write “model curriculum frameworks” and “exemplar lesson plans.”¹¹⁸ In 2015, Joanne Weiss wrote that “new curriculum materials funded through Race to the Top and released in 2014 are already in use in 20 percent of classrooms nationwide.”¹¹⁹

Recall that Achieve, the nonprofit that coordinated the writing of Common Core, runs PARCC and should thus be well aware of this federal oversight and involvement. Yet the organization routinely proclaims independence from the feds. For example, when Michigan’s legislature was rethinking its commitment to Common Core in 2013, Achieve’s president, Michael Cohen, testified to the state house of representatives that the vision of Common Core was for “no federal participation in the process at all — no federal funding, no federal review or involvement.”¹²⁰ At that very time, Cohen was leading a Common Core testing organization that submitted to monthly oversight calls with federal officials and was using federal funds to write national curriculum materials and tests. That same organization had helped coordinate memorandums of agreement in which signatories asked for federal assistance to launch the Common Core project.

Remember, too, that it’s flat-out illegal for the federal government to have anything to do with curriculum. Federal agencies have historically avoided the explicit legal prohibition by paying other people to write curriculum. So the feds aren’t doing it themselves, but these projects are definitely carried out under federal auspices and authority; they rely on federal funds; and their shape is influenced by federal officials. They are federal products in all but name, though Common Core supporters have clutched at technicalities to cover their rears.

The U.S. Constitution grants the federal government no power whatsoever in education policy. It’s legally a state and local responsibility. Full stop. But that changed in practice after a Supreme Court decision of 1937. In Helvering v. Davis, the Court reinterpreted the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause in a way that “allows Congress to use money to induce states to adopt policies the federal government could itself not impose,” explained James L. Buckley, a retired U.S. senator and federal judge. “The federal government cannot force states to do things, but it can bribe them to do things.” His book Saving Congress from Itself jumps off from research showing that one-sixth of the federal budget is consumed by grants to states, private organizations, and local governments to fund activities that technically fall outside the federal government’s constitutional limits.¹²¹

Running that money through the federal bureaucracy before it filters down again through local organizations to the American people is a way to increase the cost of any enterprise. It also diminishes the accountability of public officials and programs, Buckley pointed out, because it’s hard to hold local officials accountable for the failure of a federal program. They didn’t think it up, they just went along to keep their jobs or to get back some of the money their constituents were obliged to send to the federal government. “The public at large has got to become aware of how much this affects them” not just in their pocketbooks, said Buckley, but also in terms of “the democratic ability to determine what’s going to happen in their back yard and how their money is going to be used.”

Passing Common Core to Find Out What’s In It

Remember that forty states and the District of Columbia signed RTT contracts with the Obama administration in 2010 promising to use Common Core before even a draft of it was available.¹²² This helps explain why almost nobody had heard of Common Core until well after it was etched in stone. Even education reporters said little about Common Core until parents began complaining about what was happening in their children’s classrooms.

A search of “Common Core standards” in all English-language newspapers in the LexisNexis search engine brings up 371 stories in 2010.¹²³ That’s an average of seven news stories per state for the whole year, in all publications. For the year 2009, when the project was germinating, a search finds barely more than thirty stories in all.

In the nation’s dominant newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, a total of twenty-one print articles on Common Core appeared in 2009–10. Only one article in each publication during that time referenced a critic of the initiative. In the Times, it was a Chicago parent worried that national tests would lead to overtesting. In the Post, it was Neal McCluskey from the libertarian Cato Institute making one critical point alongside positive statements by three other people plus reference to a supportive study.

The Wall Street Journal’s archives do not appear on Lexis, and their own online archives don’t show results earlier than 2011, but in that year the Journal published only six stories containing those search terms. One was a supportive op-ed by Jeb Bush and Joel Klein, former New York City schools chancellor. The others were routine reports on the standards rolling out into schools, a done deal.

Once parents noticed the changes coming into their children’s schools, their outcries prompted more extensive news coverage. In 2011, a Lexis-Nexis search for the terms “Common Core standards” turned up 448 articles. The number doubled the next year, to 889. Then came a surge in 2013, with 2,273 stories — more than six times as many as in 2010, the year that Common Core effectively became national policy. In 2014, the number more than doubled over the previous year, to 4,847.

Print mentions of “Common Core” and “standards,” 2009–2014

These statistics indicate that reporters failed to keep the public informed of the extensive changes afoot in education before the signatures were inked. By the time parents had enough information to voice their opposition, their school districts were legally obligated to keep the train moving.

Frederick Hess and Michael McShane of the American Enterprise Institute published a study of news reporting on Common Core in which they found that the initiative “received hardly any attention at all” in the popular press while it was being created and adopted by most of the states.¹²⁴ The media attention spiked only when the curriculum mandates were actually in the classrooms. Here’s their graph of the news coverage by month from 2009 through 2013:

Common Core referenced in articles by month, 2009–2013

Hess and McShane also compared the media coverage of Common Core with that of another controversial education policy, school vouchers, by number of stories per year in relation to the number of children affected. In 2013, the year of highest Common Core coverage they reviewed, reporters wrote one article for every four children who received a school voucher, but one for every 1,100 children whose schools had to use Common Core. That’s a difference of 27,500 percent.

They further searched for “Common Core” together with descriptive terms relating to political conflict, such as “supporter” and “opponent.” This led to “a straightforward conclusion: the coverage of the standards at the outset was generally glowing, rarely referencing any kind of conflict until it had already bubbled over.”

Despite the surge of media attention in 2013, a national PDK/Gallup survey in May of that year found that 62 percent of Americans had never heard of Common Core. Among parents with children in public school, 55 percent had never heard of it.¹²⁵ That might be expected in a closed society where citizens are not involved in governance by design, but our laws and traditions grant the American people the power of self-government through elected representation. To govern their own affairs, however, people have to know what’s being planned for them before it’s done.

The way Common Core was quietly implemented left many Americans feeling tricked. As Hess and McShane concluded, “the mainstream media dropped the ball on covering the Common Core,” and ultimately this negligence “only fomented opposition to the standards. When parents and taxpayers found out that the standards had already been adopted, they thought the wool had been pulled over their eyes.”¹²⁶ Those parents and taxpayers thought correctly.

The convoluted and opaque way that Common Core was developed and imposed has deprived parents and taxpayers of the right to know and influence the rules that affect our lives, and to know what is being done with the money we send to the government. The general public had no opportunity to give genuine consent to Common Core and all its baggage. So the average folks paying the bills and supplying the human guinea pigs for this experiment had to wait until it was passed to find out what was in it — to borrow Representative Nancy Pelosi’s immortal words about Obamacare, which at least was put to a vote by duly elected legislators. In that respect, Common Core is a greater affront to democratic governance.