Steven Singer wants you to know the truth: No matter how much she denies it, Betsy DeVos really really loves Common Core!
He has the evidence to prove it.
She’s a board member of Jeb Bush’s pro-Common Core think tank, Foundation for Excellence in Education, where she hangs out with prominent Democratic education reformers like Bill Gates and Eli Broad. But she says that somehow doesn’t mean she likes it.
She founded, funds and serves on the board of the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), an organization dedicated to the implementation and maintenance of Common Core. But somehow that doesn’t mean she’s for the standards.
She’s even spent millions lobbying politicians in her home state of Michigan asking them NOT to repeal Common Core. But somehow that doesn’t mean she’s in favor of it.
It must be a hard position to be in.
Her entire nomination for Trump’s cabinet is contingent on convincing the public that she hates this thing that he explicitly campaigned against but she favored.
Rarely has an education policy been such a political hot potato as Common Core. Typically Republicans hate it and Democrats love it. However, little of this has to with its actual merits – or lack thereof.
Common Core is a set of academic standards saying what students should know in each grade. Nonetheless, these standards are deeply unpopular with teachers, students, parents and the general public. Part of this stems from the undemocratic way state legislatures were bribed to enact them by the Obama administration in many cases before they were even done being written and often circumventing the voting process altogether. Other criticisms come from the way the standards were devised almost entirely by standardized test corporations without input from experts in the field like child psychologists and classroom teachers. Finally, the standards get condemnation for what they do to actual classrooms – narrowing the curriculum, promoting excessive test prep, increased paperwork, the purchase of new text and work books and requiring new and more unfair standardized assessments.
As a Republican, DeVos must do everything she can to distance herself from this policy.
It’s just that her history of advocating for it gets in the way.
Every statement that Singer makes is documented in links. And the story is longer than what is quoted here. Open and see his stunning graphics and read the rest of the post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think this is easy to understand. CC is a useful tool for destroying public schools but once they are taken out of the picture she wants her ersatz enterprises free of it or any other form of standards or accountability.
GLEP, that says it all. Nasty step-mother of GLOP, Great Load of Obfuscation and Prevarication. Doctor, I think I have a bad case of the GLEP, is it fatal? Bottom line, DeVos is a far right wing libertarian radical who hates public schools or anything that smacks of her distorted version of socialism. Trump’s whole cabinet, whole administration is nothing but incompetent yahoos, conniving plutocrats, Ayn Randian schemers and nihilists. This is an absolute tragedy for this country.
Well stated. The Common Core is what we get when we remove educators from education. Policymakers don’t want to hear from teachers because they want corporations to assume the role of public education. The Common Core is “intellectual dictatorship.” The end result is something that is done to the profession, not for the profession or students. The goal is to attempt to annihilate teaching as a profession.
Anything and anyone linked to Trump must be doubted, because lies flow from his mouth like greasy slime into sewers from a billion homes. I woke up this morning to read that Trump is going to save Christmas and stop evil liberals from destroying it, and what I read was about Trump saying this in front of one of his rallies for future fascists with thousands of those future fascists going crazy cheering him.
I hope this was another rumor and wasn’t actually true like most of the crap we hear from the right about Hillary Clinton. Someone tell me with links to the evidence that it’s false and Trump really didn’t say this to a roaring crowd of future fascists; that it didn’t happen.
Ugh. She should be ashamed to get on stage and claims she doesn’t support this. They really believe ordinary people are dopes.
So one of the first things she told the public in her first job in government was a flat-out lie? That’s reassuring. I’ll keep that in mind when she claims to support existing public schools.
No one should be surprised. She’s a political donor and political activist. Her job in the US Department of Ed will be to advance a conservative anti-public school agenda. It’s not like they hide this. “Government schools” is derisive. It’s not a phrase people who value existing public schools would use.
She’s vehemently opposed to labor unions. I’m curious if she’ll use her public post to campaign against labor unions while supposedly “advocating for children”. The default position in the ed reform echo chamber is to blame everything on evil labor unions. I guarantee she’ll try to portray any public dissent as a plot by unions. It’s so common in ed reform circles it’s comical.
“Part of this stems from the undemocratic way state legislatures were bribed to enact them by the Obama administration ”
If our state lawmakers can be “bribed” with the RttT funding which didn’t even cover the costs of the RttT initiatives, then they’re too stupid to serve in elected office.
This “bribed” theory doesn’t make any sense. It never made any sense. RttT wasn’t enough money to bribe any state to do anything.
State lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, voted for Common Core because they supported it. They’re big grown up adults. They have agency. Hold them accountable for their actions.
When DeVos dangles charter and voucher funding and the same people line up to go along will we say they were “bribed” again? Or can we treat them as adults and hold them accountable for making decisions?
There’s nothing undemocratic about the federal government setting conditions on funding. None of you would object (I hope) if the federal government set compliance with civil rights as a condition of funding. They do that all the time. If they left it up to states we’re back to pre-Civil War days.
And RttT wasn’t even “basic funding”. It was a faddish management idea-the “competitive” stuff ed reformers love because they worship the private sector. 4 billion dollars split 50 ways isn’t enough to bribe a state to do anything. I don’t even think it was a net gain for districts in Ohio. A lot of them say they regret taking it- it cost more than the grant.
GOP state lawmakers are weaseling out of a decision they made because their base seized on it as objectionable. It’s politics. DeVos has to say she will “repeal” Common Core because Trump pandered to voters and lied to them.
Everything we need to know about the Common Core/school reform profiteering game can be found in your final statement: Trump pandered to voters and lied to them. This is HOW he got himself elected.
Some misinformation is circulating. State legislatures had nothing to do with the adoption of the Common Core. Here is story from Mercedes Schneider who broke the through the fog of misinformation concocted to soft sell the CCSS as if these just bubbled-up from some fairy dust sprinkled across the states and by other forms of magical thinking came out so perfectly that one of the first rules of implementation: use these word-for word, verbatim. I kid you not.
Only two state officials had to sign “the memorandum of understanding” for the whole public system to “adopt” the CCSS. This MOU came with lots of future plans and absurd claims
Please check the document at https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/the-common-core-memorandum-of-understanding-what-a-story/
Singer’s right.
Anywhere I can read more about Common Core? The whole thing leaves me very confused.
See below …
There’s one recent perspective here:
Thank you, Jon
I think “Common Core” should be a category in the menu..
CC’s not going away.. mainly because we have to raise standards to compete with the rest of the world, and no one’s offered viable alternatives. An apathetic public prevented widespread knowledge of it–which started in the late 1990’s. ALL the governors were in on it.. the people just weren’t interested. So when it was put in place, OH MY what a surprise! And, we’re being FORCED to accept it! What a crock! If the people would get out of their lazy funk and READ, maybe they would really be able to make informed decisions instead of the crazy crap on the media today!
Ren, neither the governors nor state chiefs knew what was in CCSS. They signed on in hopes of getting Race to Top $$$$$$$$$
“we have to raise standards to compete with the rest of the world”
Wow, the greedy, corrupt corporate pirates really got to you with their lies and misinformation.
The U.S. has the largest GDP in the world,and its manufacturing sector, that’s mostly automated, thanks to all those college educated engineers and scientists that built the robots and programed the computers, is the 2nd largest in the world.
The U.S. is ranked 1st with a 24.7 percent of the global GDP
China is in 2nd place with 15.1 percent
Japan is 3rd with 6.29 percent.
http://statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-projected-gdp.php
Then there is the fact that the U.S. is ranked among the top ten educated countries in the world with almost 3 college graduates for every job that requires a college degree.
Even for literacy, the U.S. is #1 if we measure the revenue of the publishing industry in the U.S.
For instance, U.S. Publishing annual revenue was almost $28 billion in 2015
http://newsroom.publishers.org/us-publishing-industrys-annual-survey-reveals-nearly-28-billion-in-revenue-in-2015
Compared to the box office for films/movies in the U.S. In 2015 that revenue was a record $11 billion.
The U.S. publishing industry is almost three times the size of the film/movie industry in the U.S.
What about the global weapons industry? The U.S. controls 31 percent of the world’s weapons sales. Russia is in 2nd place at 27 percent. China is tied with Germany and France at 5 percent each.
List of countries by wealth.
Total wealth in the U.S. is $84,784,000,000,000
2nd place goes to Japan at $24,070,000,000,000
China is ranked 3rd with $23.393,000,000,000
http://newsroom.publishers.org/us-publishing-industrys-annual-survey-reveals-nearly-28-billion-in-revenue-in-2015
Conclusion, the rest of the world has to compete with the United States in just about everything even porn production.
Oh, I forgot to provide a link that compares global manufacturing sectors by country. Remember when Little Foreigners Donald Trump repeatedly lied and said that the U.S. doesn’t make anything anymore and all the ingrowing deplorable fools that voted for him believed that lie?
China passed the US back in 2013 but China has more than four times the population, and the US is still ranked 2nd in the world for its manufacturing sector. Since 1979, the US has almost doubled production in the manufacturing sector.
And the U.S. is still number one in other sectors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_sector_composition
And to complete, what to Common Core idiots want to do, punish children, teachers and even parents because of test scores. I haven’t met a test score yet that made something and sold it.
Common Core is NG. Let’s hold the Republicans accountable for promising to leave the matter of education up to the states as the tenth amendment calls for.