Jamie Gass writes here about a powerful literary tradition that was honored in Massachusetts and perhaps a few other places, but was tossed aside by the state when it adopted the Common Core.

Gass illogically puts the blame on “educrats” and schools of education for the decision that junked the state’s reverence for literature: the political decision by its governors to pursue Race to the Top funding and endorse the Common Core. The blame lies with the Gates Foundation, which funded the federally mandated, content-free Common Core. Then with the authors of the Core, who took upon themselves the task of writing national standards. And then, of course, the elected officials of both parties who put money above principle.

Gass writes:

The Bay State, with English standards that were rich in classic literature and high-quality vocabulary, outperformed every other state between 2005 and 2017 on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), “the nation’s report card.”

When Deval Patrick and Charlie Baker studied English at Harvard, its revered professor W. Jackson Bate won the 1978 National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for his Samuel Johnson biography.

Interestingly, Dr. Johnson’s Dictionarydefines “politician” as “a man of artifice; one of deep contrivance.”

In 2010, the hollowness of the Patrick administration’s sloganeering – “education is our calling card” – was revealed when they took $250 million in one-time federal grant money to abandon our proven English standards and MCAS tests in favor of inferior nationalized Common Core and PARCC testing, which cut enduring fiction by 60 percent.

The Baker administration could have easily ended Common Core’s academic mediocrity in the Bay State, but instead it followed Patrick’s example by deferring to the wishes of career state edu-crats.

Why blame state employees for decisions made by the governors of both parties, the state commissioner, and the state board?