Conservatives have a problem: they don’t like federal overreach. They supposedly like local control. But so many conservative thought leaders like Bobby Jindal, Jeb Bush, and Michelle Rhee support the Common Core that they have to figure out how to justify why a program beloved by the federal Department of Education should appeal to conservatives.
Peter Greene explains what a heavy lift this is and how unconvincing it is.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Last week the Tennessee state house voted 82-11 to delay the implementation of the PARCC and CCSS much to the dismay of our moderate Gov. Bill Haslam and Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman (Rhee’s ex husband). The interesting thing in the vote is that the ultra conservatives were voting with the liberal democrats. Education issues make strange bedfellows in a state of extremes. The measure still has to pass the senate, but I thnk it is fascinating how this corporate-driven educational reform of public schools is playing out politically.
Reblogged this on McBlog.
Why would Greene refer to Bush, Jindal and Christie as “moderate GOP governors”? As opposed to those affiliated with the Tea Party? To me, they are very powerful mainstream conservative thugs and two of them promote voucher schools where creationism is taught, so there’s very little difference between them and Tea Partiers in my mind.
This is spot on though, “Corporate power grabs are pan-political, and Democrats and Republicans of all stripes have been happy to jump on the gravy train. Fordham is a conservative voice that has received a truckload of money from the Gates Foundation. It’s funny how sometimes green is a much stronger color than red or blue.”
Ironic it took a Greene to note this.
“Conservatives” had a chance to stop federal overreach when Bush put in NCLB, but they went for it.
Seems to me it’s too late now for them to raise an objection. What’s the difference? The President has a “D” after his name?
They should look at the bright side! With any luck, this latest mandate will further weaken and undermine our much-maligned “government schools” and we can all go to the free market voucher system they’ve always wanted.
HUGE political and policy victory for them, actually.
The last universal truly public system in the US is turned over to the private sector. They’ve been more successful than Barry Goldwater ever dreamed.
They won. Conservatives absolutely run the table on ed reform. Liberals got absolutely nothing out of this privatization deal Democrats made.
You are right Chiara, but we all are losing. Can we get out of this game?
I don’t know, but I’m 51 and I watched Democrats join with Republicans to de-regulate the financial sector, pass trade deals that have done nothing but harm to my area of the country (the rust belt) and invade Iraq. I’ve watched them make spectacular blunders that were cheered on by a lot of smart people in media and government circles.
I think we’ll regret, and pay for, the decision to privatize the public school system in the same way we regretted and paid for those “bipartisan” decisions. This one is actually a bigger blunder, because it’s irreversible and affects every single town or city in the country. It’s profound and lasting in a way that those other bipartisan blunders were not.
If we lose this public system, we won’t get it back. I think the vast majority of Americans will regret allowing that to happen, but by then it will be too late of course. Once the private sector gets ahold of a public system, we never get it back. No one does, in any country. I can’t think of a single example of a public system that was taken back public once it was privatized, anywhere. That’s why it doesn’t really matter if the privatized system is “better”. The public system is gone. There’s no comparison left to be made.
If we lose this public system, we won’t get it back.
Not that it matters, but for me Democrats maligning and then abandoning public schools is a deal-breaker. It crosses a line because it has a direct and harmful effect on my community. I live here. I’m committed to this place. This is where I have my business and make my living and my 11 year old goes to our public schools. The people that work in our public schools are my neighbors, and, actually, my customers. It’s personal.
I’m confident our school will do the best they can with whatever they’re handed, and my 11 year will survive this, but I watched this happen and I know we were either abandoned or actively undermined every step of the way.
We really didn’t deserve that shabby treatment from “our elected leaders”. It’s a deal breaker for this one Democrat 🙂
What I find vaguely insulting is how the think tank and lobbyist set are pitching Common Core exclusively to the Tea Party parents.
I’m not a member of the GOP base, and neither are the vast majority of the public school parents.
I love how the DC crowd aren’t at all worried about what we think.
Ed reform debates are conducted among the 5% of charter/voucher schools and 5% of the parents. It’s as if the rest of us, and our schools, don’t exist.
I would bet money that 99 out of a 100 parents here have no idea what the Common Core is, and they will only find out when their kids fail whichever test we’re getting. The thought leaders can’t be bothered with those parents, the sole focus is on the GOP base.
It just gives one a real sense of the extent that conservatives dominate the ed reform debate. Total. There’s not even a “middle” let alone a liberal voice.
I would say that’s because from what I can tell, and contrary to Greene’s assumptions, the rank-and-file conservatives are actually NOT happy with Common Core.
There’s a disconnect between what the GOP (corporatist) leaders want and their ( conservative, not crazy about central planning) troops want.
Unfortunately, conservatives have never had a problem being hypocrites.
It has long seemed to be entirely BIZARRE that organizations that OPPOSE distant, centralized regulation (the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, ALEC, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution, for example) and support local autonomy and differing ideas that compete with one another in a free marketplace would be working so hard to IMPOSE distant, centralized regulation on U.S. K-12 education.
Bizarre.
This is as bizarre as Bill gates giving speeches about how the way to innovation is through standardization and regimentation. But one can understand why Bill is fooling himself there. He’s a technocrat. He sees a single set of national standards, national evaluation systems, and national tests as a way of getting everyone doing the same thing so that it all can be computerized.
Do these other groups actually believe the things they say about freedom, about competition, about small government, about local autonomy? Or are those things just part of a con that they pretend to espouse when it serves their own or their pals’ business purposes (allowing bankers to sell insurance or do brokerage) and that they disavow when it violates those (when it would make it harder for Silicon Valley execs to replace teachers with software and grifters to run lucrative charter school operations)?
Bob Shepherd: I much appreciate your postings, so please take this as my take on those individuals and groups that “OPPOSE distant, centralized regulation.”
I refer here not to self-consciously crafted public statements but all the many conversations I have had, and have heard, from the same sorts of folks as well as keeping an eye on their behaviors.
As part of a palatable public stance, they will in THEORY support what is right and good and moral but in PRACTICE they have absolutely no qualms about doing a complete 180 when it suits their purposes. *IMHO, this can apply right across the political spectrum when perceived vital interests are at stake. I hold everyone’s feet to the fire.*
For example, how absurd can it be for the hard right proponents of charters and privatization who not too long ago rightly ridiculed the Soviet Union for its Potemkin Villages and phony metrics of success and fantastical claims of social equality and the like—
To gush like giddy adolescents at their latest tour of a miracle charter, to get weak in the knees at highly touted 100% graduation rates at the same, and with not even a trace of intellectual rigor and moral honesty claim that charters typically take in, retain, and graduate “the exact same kinds of kids that attend the nearby local public schools”?
The main thrust of the charterite/privatizer movement is immoral. The leading players are playing us in their attempt to socially re-engineer a major part of American democracy and dumb down the vast majority of the population—and just where are those opposed to such things?
They’re on board as long as it favors them and theirs.
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
On rare occasions, I have found folks in this crowd of “classical liberals,” as they style themselves, who actually hold the principles that they espouse, but many are just opportunists who use the cloak of this theory to cover the nakedness of their greed and opportunism. They rail against big government programs and spent 6 trillion dollars for foreign adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan. They rail against centralized regulation and the feds stealing away local autonomy and control, and then foist the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat upon us. Liars.
For example, how absurd can it be for the hard right proponents of charters and privatization who not too long ago rightly ridiculed the Soviet Union for its Potemkin Villages and phony metrics of success and fantastical claims of social equality and the like—
Oh, Krazy, that is so very well said!
The CC$$ defenses read so very much like old issues of Pravda.
“It has long seemed to be entirely BIZARRE that organizations that OPPOSE distant, centralized regulation (the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, ALEC, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution, for example) and support local autonomy and differing ideas that compete with one another in a free marketplace would be working so hard to IMPOSE distant, centralized regulation on U.S. K-12 education.”
I don’t think they are really. It is merely a stop on the way to total privatization. Control of education will be in private hands and government will have nothing to control.
Of course it is, not2old. These people are U.S.-style classical liberals. But they don’t see the contradiction between supporting the Libertarian cause of privatization and supporting the Totalitarian cause of invariant, mandated, centralized, authoritarian “standards.”
It’s very, very odd to see these “champions of free markets” supporting the creation of a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
So, they are either a) very, very confused or b) liars.
CROOKS and liars. http://crooksandliars.com/solr/privatizing%20education