Common Core came under attack on Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as a panel of two education experts outlined their issues with the educational standards. Getting out of federally funded testing programs and grassroots opposition were described as two important ways to roll back Common Core.
Despite Common Core’s unpopularity, conservatives are struggling to get the educational standards repealed. Many states had to adopt the standards in order to receive a waiver from now-impossible provisions of the old No Child Left Behind law from President Obama’s Department of Education.
Most states altered their education systems to accommodate Common Core before public opinion turned against the standards. Many states joined one of the two federally-funded testing consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. But dropouts have now left only 29 states as full members of either consortium.
“If you can get out of the tests, and your state can run your own tests, then for all intents and purposes you can begin to reclaim control of your state’s education system,” Neal McCluskey, an educational scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, said on the panel.
McCluskey said Common Core spread through Obama’s Race to the Top program, where states received extra education funding for adopting education reforms preferred by the Obama administration. Obama’s method of persuading states to join Common Core was even more effective as education funding was scarce during the recession. McCluskey compared this method of persuasion to mugging.
“People say ‘states voluntarily adopted the Common Core.’ And you can only say ‘voluntary’ if you’re also willing to say if somebody mugged you and said ‘Well if you’d like your money back all you have to do is give me your car.’ And if you voluntarily give them your car, then you can say it’s voluntary.”
The other panelist was Emmett McGroarty, who leads on education policy at the American Principles Project. “This is a movement led by grassroots activists … and they’re going to war against anything that interferes with their right to have a say in what their children learn,” McGroarty said. “That includes Republicans in Congress, that includes Democrats in Congress, that includes the current attempt to try to re-authorize No Child Left Behind.”
McGroarty was staunchly opposed to Common Core, saying it “blocks children into an inferior, low-quality education.”
McCluskey was more focused on schools being forced into Common Core without parents being able to choose alternatives. “What possible justification is there for the federal government to be pushing one curriculum … on every school and therefore every student … in America?” He later added, “Whatever the problem with Common Core … all kids learn different things in different ways and have different desires, abilities, goals, and the like. And to think that it makes sense to have one set of standards … for everyone is just nonsensical.”
