Arne Duncan has been vigorously defending the Common Core standards and vigorously insisting that they were created by the governors and the states. Of course, he must do this because it is illegal for the U.S. Department of Education to interfere in curriculum and instruction in the nation’s schools.

But his version of how the Common Core came to be adopted by nearly every state since 2009 is not accurate. It would be interesting to ask the nation’s governors what they know about the Common Core and even more interesting to ask them to take one of the two federally-funded tests of the Common Core. If that seems a stretch, how about having the nation’s chief state school officers–who are cheerleading for the Common Core–take the test?

As for the states “leading the way,” as Duncan often claims, that’s not quite right. Earlier this year, Robert Scott, who was Texas Commissioner of Education until Governor Perry canned him for his criticism of out-of-control testing, said bluntly that his state was asked to adopt the Common Core before they were finished. Texas said no. Most other states said yes, because they wanted a chance to win Race to the Top funding.

For the real story behind Common Core, read what Valerie Strauss wrote here.

Here is a key section:

“The Core initiative was started in 2007 by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, a bipartisan effort to come up with a common set of K-12 standards in English language arts and math across states that would better prepare students for colleges and careers than in the past.

“The standards were written by school reformer and entrepreneur David Coleman, who now heads the College Board, and Susan Pimental of Achieve Inc., an organization created to advance “standards-based” education. Starting in 2009, the Obama administration, in its main education initiative, required states that wanted to compete for Race to the Top reform dollars to adopt the standards. It also gave some $360 million to two consortia of states developing standardized tests aligned to the Core, exams whose results would be used to evaluate teachers, another controversial part of the Obama reform agenda.”

And more:

“There is some irony in the fact that Arne Duncan keeps saying that the Core is not the work of the federal government while he, the federal secretary of education, goes around attacking its critics. In fact, he just bowed to those critics, agreeing to give states an extra year to comply with federal mandates on using Core-aligned standardized tests to evaluate teachers.”

Another angle: the Gates Foundation plowed more than $100 million into every aspect of the Common Core: the development, the evaluation, the implementation, the advocacy, on and on.

It seems that most of the nation’s grassroots are growing in Seattle, then watered inside the Beltway.