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.