In a 2014 article on Common Core, Andrew Ferguson wrote, “Conservative hostility to the Common Core is also entangled with hostility to President Obama and his administration. Joy Pullman, an editor and writer who is perhaps the most eloquent and responsible public critic of Common Core, wrote recently in thefederalist.com: ‘I wager that 90 percent of the debate over Common Core would instantly dissipate if states adopted the top-rated standards from, say, Massachusetts or Indiana and dropped the Obama administration tests.'”
Come November, Massachusetts voters may decide whether to repeal those national standards and restore their original ones—largely thanks to a scrappy group of grassroots activists, most of them parents, many of them apolitical, seeking by petition to secure a ballot measure for repeal.
The 2014 repeal of Common Core standards in Indiana did not restore the previous Indiana standards Pullman pointed to, but instead started unsteadily from scratch. Unlike Indiana, Massachusetts’s repeal of Common Core would bring schools right back to the testing standards that had worked well in the state before.
The Bay State’s standards were widely considered the best and consistently ranked among the most rigorous in the country. A testament to the quality of Massachusetts’s prior standards, Michigan bill 826, to replace Core standards with Massachusetts’s old standards, was warmly received by the state senate in April.
We’re essentially seeing a populist movement to restore a level of intellectual rigor parents and teachers have been missing since the adoption of the Core standards in 2010. Sandra Stotsky, an author of the old standards and prominent advocate for their reinstatement, pointed out to me that a unique focus on Western Civilization was the bedrock of the old, content-driven Massachusetts standards for history, among those Michigan bill 826 may adopt. Now, educators opposed to Common Core observe that the new testing standards, at least in practice, favor critical thinking skills at a loss to content—these skills, of course, lose their meaning in the absence of rich content.
Core-evangelists ask that old dogs just give the new tricks a decent try. Eventually they’ll revise every old curriculum to fit the new standards, and then scores will catch up to the tested skills. Parents who complain about their kids’ being “guinea pigs” for the new standards are selfishly depriving future kids the rewards of today’s kids’ sacrifice—or so Core loyalists could claim. But parents’ complaints parallel a teacherly argument for the superiority of Massachusetts’ preexisting standards: In classroom practice and under continuous refinement from 1997 until 2010, the old standards are tested, proven and by no means outmoded.
There’s no likelier flop than an untested lesson, and at a much larger scale, the same is true of the national standards. Just as teachers struggling with common core implementation share lessons with each other and learn from each other’s trials, so do entire states: Michigan Bill 826, if passed, could install Massachusetts’s old standards even before Massachusetts would get to it, that is, if its measure makes it onto the ballot.
Tea Party enthusiasm notwithstanding, the repeals are practical as well as political. They follow the passage of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, set to go into effect in 2017. Known, naturally, by its acronym ESSA, this new reform promises to relieve some of the strict federal oversight under No Child Left Behind. The Obama administration offered relief from NCLB—pronounced Nickleby—to states adopting part or all of the Core standards. So, the diminishing incentive frees states to repeal them.
In 2016, Donald Trump has railed against Common Core, when it’s come up. He’s echoing Ted Cruz’s promise to close down the Department of Education, which upon its establishment under Jimmy Carter in 1979 kicked off decades of top-down education reforms.
Core rebels thrilled by the prospect of top-down repeal face major obstacles, however. Federal restraint prevents the repeal of these centrally-controlled and federally-supported sets of standards—the states technically chose to adopt them, many with their own partial deviations.
Gates Foundation funding and Obama’s relieving NCLB regulations in exchange for Core adoption coerced a premature rollout from the top down. But rolling Core back up and throwing it away can only ever happen one state at a time.
And so, it is.
This post has been updated to clarify the role of Western Civ. in the Massachusetts standards for history.
