Peter Greene knows that breaking up is hard to do. But it is happening. The people who love charters also were promoting Common Core. They had a common goal: make public schools look bad, then watch the stampede to privately-managed charters.

What is it about Common Core that has made it toxic? The more teachers use it, the more the polls show they don’t like it. Rhetoric to the contrary, CCSS does tell teachers how to teach, based on the likes and dislikes of the authors, few of whom ever were classroom teachers. Rhetoric to the contrary, the early grades set absurd expectations that some children will meet easily, and others won’t reach for a year or two. No one on the writing team had ever taught little kids or had no idea that they develop at different rates. No one had any experience teaching students with disabilities, most of whom will look bad on Common Core tests. Greene points to the number of governors, like Malloy and Cuomo, who disowned the Common Core, but I think it is better to wait and see what happens now that the election is over.

Greene writes:

The Ed Reform movement has always been a marriage of different groups whose interests and goals sometimes aligned, and sometimes did not. The Systems Guys, the Data Overlords, the Common Core Corporate Hustlers, the Charter Privateers, the Social Engineers– they agree on some things (we need to replace variable costly teachers with low-cost uniform widgets), but there are cracks in the alliance, one seems to be turning into a fissure.

The Common Core Hustlers are being dumped by the Charter Privateers. It’s not an obvious break-up– the privateers haven’t texted the Core backers to say, “Hey, we need to talk.” It’s the slow, soft drop. The unreturned phone calls. The unwillingness to even say the name. Not even making eye contact when they show up at the same party. It’s awkward. It’s painful.

It wasn’t always like this. Charters and the Core were a match made in heaven. To spur financing and enrollment, the Charter forces needed a way to “prove” that public schools suck, and that meant finding a yardstick with which public schools could be measured and found failing. That meant some sort of standardized test, and that meant something to test them on. So, Common Core. The Core and the Tests (from which it could not, must not, be separated) would be the smoking gun, the proof that public schools were failing and that only privatizing schools would save Our Nation’s Youth.

The corporate folks liked it because it was another opportunity for market growth. The fake liberals liked it because it could be packaged as a way to bring equity to the poor. The fake conservatives liked it because it could be packaged as a way to use market forces to get those slacker poor folks into line.The Core and Charter really got each other. They wanted all the same things.

But soon, the love affair between charters and the Core started to show strain. The Core would show up late at night, smelling like Big Government. And while everybody’s friends liked the Core when it first started coming around, but as they got to know it, they started whispering behind its back that it was kind of an asshole. Pretty soon, old friends like Bobby Jindal were calling the Core out in public. And when election season came, they weren’t invited to the same parties together any more. Jeb Bush had been the Core’s oldest and best friend, and even he had a huge party where Charters were held up for praise and applause and the Core wasn’t even mentioned.

There was no longer any denying it. When Charter walked into the cafeteria, instead of sitting down with the Core and telling friends, “You should come sit with the Core. It’s cool” instead Charter would sit on the other side of the room and say, “You don’t want to sit at that table with that thing.”

Once the Core had been a marketing point. Public schools were bad news because they couldn’t do Common Core well enough. Now public schools are bad news because they are trying to do Common Core well enough. We used to market charters as a way to run toward the Core; now we market them as a way to run away from it.

 
None of the reformsters who now disown Common Core are dropping any other part of the reformster agenda, especially not privatization.

And you can bet they are not dropping high-stakes testing either, unless the public revolt gets loud enough for legislators to hear it.