Hollow Common Core

Accuracy in Academia ^ | August 3, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

[AccuracyAcademia]

In their frustration with education reform, conservative theorists often fall prey to the same inclination of their putative opponents—nationalization. In their rush to nationalize tough standards for schools, these scholars often find the standard elusive: Only the national part remains. Think No Child Left Behind.

That dance is about to begin anew. “The K-12 academic standards in English language arts (ELA) and math produced last month by the Common Core State Standards Initiative are clearer and more rigorous than today’s ELA standards in 37 states and today’s math standards in 39 states,” the Fordham Institute found.

Yet even two Fordham spokesmen enthusiastic about such changes—Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli—admit that:

“A number of states signed on to the Common Core standards at least in part to boost their chances of getting federal education dollars from [Education Secretary Arne] Duncan’s ‘Race to the Top’ competition” and

“There are risks inherent in a national anything, particularly if the federal government clumsily tries to intervene.”

“Increasing federal power has not improved education in the past half century,” Rachel Sheffield and Lindsay Burke at the Heritage Foundation observe. “Why would this boost to federal power be any different?” Why indeed.

[taxcontrol]

I am a firm believer that the Constitution allows for only one action by the federal government when it comes to education. Namely, to define what constitutes education at a certain level 1st grade, 6th grade, etc. It derives this authority from and is limited by the interstate commerce clause.

The condition being that a student leaves one state and travels to another. In order to understand the education level of that student, a federal measure (note - not a standard) COULD be used to evaluate those skills.

However, this would not be my preferred means of handling this. I would rather see the feds require the gaining district to test the student for placement according to local standards.

[Maceman]

In 2010, Barack Obama is calling for fixing the public education system by giving us the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and “Race to the Top”, which will fix the 2001 GW Bush and Ted Kennedy legislation called “No Child Left Behind,” which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,” which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,” which was a 1991 response during the Bush administration to a 1983 federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk, which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter fixed the nation’s public school system by first establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.