While Washington focuses on the federal power grab in health care, there’s another ongoing drive for regimentation that hasn’t received the scrutiny it deserves. A panel of educators assembled by 48 state governors and school superintendents just released a uniform set of math and reading standards for the nation’s 50 million public school students. If the “Common Core State Standards Initiative” were totally voluntary, there’d be little to fear. But for too many education reformers, whatever is not forbidden is compulsory.
Arne Duncan, the Chicago schools apparatchik that President Obama tapped to run the Department of Education, has said that “if we accomplish one thing in the coming years, it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America.” Last year’s stimulus package gave Duncan more than $4 billion to hand out to states doing D.C.’s bidding. “No other education secretary has ever had that much cash at his disposal,” the National Journal notes.
