Thirty years ago this month, Americans were startled to learn that their underachieving public schools were undermining the future prosperity and security of the nation. “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people,” a report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education warned, adding, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

In the ensuing three decades, billions of federal dollars have been spent on efforts to improve public education, including the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top funding for urban inner-city schools. The latest is Common Core, which standardizes curriculum requirements at the national level and used what pundit Hayden Smith calls “$4.35 billion worth of carrots swinging in front of 50 hungry rabbits” to convince 46 states and the District of Columbia to adopt it.