Common Core and Its Discontents

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Common Core and Its Discontents
By Craig Sower
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.*
— Oliver
Cromwell, in Carlyle 448
[They] may do the worst of things without being the worst of men.
— Edmund Burke, in
Sowell,
Intellectuals
84
What we have here is failure to communicate.
—
Cool Hand Luke
The debate about the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) is yet another
battle in the century-long struggle between progressive and traditional educators.
Supporters and opponents of CCSSI have different visions of human nature, Western
civilization, American culture, and learning and teaching. Both groups are convinced of the
rightness of their cause and neither shows signs of backing down. Not only do we lack a
shared vision, we lack a vocabulary that would permit rational discussion based on
empirical data and logic. People on both sides make what Sowell calls “arguments without
arguments” (
Intellectuals
80). Some Common Core opponents accuse its authors of dark
motives and evil intent. Similarly, Common Core advocates attack the race, religious
* On August 3, 1650, Oliver Cromwell wrote to the General Assembly of the Kirk of
Scotland in an attempt to avoid a religious war. They wishfully told him to mind his own
business and keep his hands to himself. One month later at the Battle of Dunbar,
Cromwell’s army killed or captured 14,000 Scots. Ever since, his words have served as a
warning against extremism, though it is not always obvious who, in a given situation, is
being extreme.

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beliefs, and political affiliations of critics rather than responding to specific criticisms. Even
if it could be proven that every opponent of Common Core were a white, fundamentalist
Christian, Tea Party lunatic it would not answer their critiques of the CCSSI. Likewise,
even if the authors of Common Core were shown to be Satan-worshipping Illuminati from
long-forgotten KGB sleeper cells it would say nothing of the validity of the standards.
This paper is divided into four parts. Part-1 traces the effects of two worldviews: the
Tragic Vision and the Vision of the Anointed. It then sketches the background of American
progressive education and the history of the CCSSI. Part-2 examines three sets of
standards: the Common Core Math Standards (CCMS), the standards for English
Language Arts (ELA), and the College Board’s new Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History
Framework. As we will see, the CCMS are based on “reform math,” which was tried and
failed in 1989 and 2000. The ELA standards reduce literature and increase “informational
texts” that are simplified and biased. Both the ELA and the new AP history framework
draw heavily on Critical Theory, which disparages both Western and American history and
culture.
Part-3 questions the process used to develop the Core and the system that would
implement and maintain it. The CCSSI claims to be state-led, internationally
benchmarked, and based on the latest research. In fact, however, it is none of those things.
Rather than preparing American students for 21st-century success, it relies on failed
19th-century notions of progressive education. In addition to pedagogical shortcomings, the
CCSSI is dangerously close to corporate interests that stand to profit from the effort.
Finally, the data collection regime suggested by developers is Orwellian.
Part-4 explores the fatal conceit of the CCSSI — the notion common among intellectuals
that complex social systems are best created by a small group of masterminds. The process
used to create the standards embodies the vision of the anointed that a technocratic elite
should exercise top-down control over “masses” that are incapable of self-rule. Such
systems tend to be developed in an echo chamber immune to consequential feedback and

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are therefore prone to catastrophic failure. No plan survives contact with reality, and
centralized systems of this type are notoriously slow to adapt and respond to unforeseen
events or unintended consequences.
Common Core should be rejected on the merits. This paper will show that the standards
are inadequate to achieve the results supporters claim, and that the systems envisioned for
the new regime are not conducive to a high-quality liberal education. It is not too late to
change course. On November 4th, the American people dealt sharply with progressives in
the mid-term elections. In addition to losing control of the Senate, they lost the
governorships of three long-time liberal strongholds in Maryland, Illinois, and
Massachusetts. The CCSSI was only one of many issues, but it helped feed public
discontent with the governing elites. It would be ironic if the states led Common Core out of
America’s classrooms.
Part 1: Background and History
The debate over the CCSSI is at heart a conflict between different views of the world. In
The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
, Thomas Sowell
describes two visions: the Tragic Vision, and the Vision of the Anointed; “The two visions
differ in their respective conceptions of the nature of man, the nature of the world, and the
nature of causation, knowledge, power and justice … By tragedy here is not meant simply
unhappiness, but tragedy in the ancient Greek sense, inescapable fate inherent in the
nature of things, rather than unhappiness due simply to villainy or callousness” (104).
Sower writes:
The assumption of the Tragic Vision is that human nature and life are, and always
shall be, flawed. Rather than promise transformation of the human condition into
something it can never be, those with the Tragic Vision accept that problems exist
and seek to mitigate, rather than to eliminate, them. This does not mean that they
are fond of war, disease, accidents, old age, or death, but that they recognize their

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inevitability. They seek incremental improvements in social systems that build on
past success, and avoid revolutions that are fraught with unintended consequences.
They regard utopian efforts to change human nature as being the very definition of
hubris: a fatal conceit that leads people to attempt that which is beyond earthly
powers, but which results in their ruin instead. (
Strains
3-4)
Exemplars of the Tragic Vision include Confucius, Lao Tzu (or the author(s) of the
Tao
Te Ching
), Thucydides, Zeno, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, the
Founding Fathers, C. S. Lewis, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell,
Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul II.
People with the Vision of the Anointed are utopians. They view children as Blank Slates,
infinitely malleable and ideal for reconstruction according to the master plans of elites.
They also see children as Noble Savages spoiled by the tyranny of families and religion.
These twin beliefs explain why the anointed undermine the church and family and seek to
control schools where they can produce the kind of people they prefer. They favor social
engineering, cultural revolutions, and the New Soviet Man. Not only do the anointed think
they are capable of leading the benighted away from life’s “slings and arrows” to the sunny
uplands where bad things never occur, they feel entitled to do so. Sowell writes, “The vision
of the anointed is not simply a vision of the world and its functioning in a causal sense, but
it is also a vision of themselves and of their moral role in that world.
It is a vision of
differential rectitude
. It is not a vision of the tragedy of the human condition: Problems
exist because others are not as wise or virtuous as the anointed” (
Vision
5, emphasis in
original). Examples of people with the Vision of the Anointed include Plato, Jean Jacques
Rousseau, Robespierre, Karl Marx, John Dewey, John Maynard Keynes, Theodore and
Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito
Mussolini, Mao Tse Tung, Michael Bloomberg, Barack Obama, and the various Socialist,
Fascist, and Communist movements. Progressives are the quintessence of the vision of the
anointed (see Part-4).

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Fundamental transformation of the U.S. through centralized control of American
education has been a progressive dream for over a century (see Sower 2010 and 2012). In
1892, the National Education Association (NEA) appointed a committee to suggest changes
in high school curricula to assure that students entering college would have similar skill
sets. The Committee of Ten recommended that secondary schools provide a high-quality,
liberal education to all students. The committee assumed that: 1) rigorous study disciplines
the mind; 2) this benefits all students; and 3) studying the cultural, scientific, and religious
heritage of the nation adds value to the community and uplifts society as a whole.
The NEA report kicked off the first of many progressive reforms. From 1910-1950
academic content was cut by 60% as “life-adjustment” courses rose ten-fold (Stevenson and
Stigler 108). In 1989 and again in 2000, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
(NCTM) introduced “reform math” in several states which failed disastrously “after
lowering outcomes in every state that attempted” to implement them (Phelps and Milgram
8). In 2001, President George W. Bush and Senator Ted Kennedy oversaw the passage of
the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. It mandated high-stakes testing and greater teacher
accountability, but resulted instead in states lowering standards to meet goals, cheating
scandals involving teachers, and steadily worse performance on international tests. U.S.
scores have declined in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) for a
decade. In math, the U.S. slipped from 18th out of 27, to 25th out of 30 countries. In science,
the U.S. dropped from 14th out of 27, to 21st out of 30 countries. In international literacy
tests, scores declined in every subject in both grade levels studied (4th and 8th) since 2000
(Coulson, “Conflicting”). U.S. students are still first in self-esteem. Teachers’ unions blame
inadequate support. However, as performance declined from 1970 to 2009, staffing doubled
and total inflation-adjusted spending per student for K-12 public education increased from
$55,000 to $151,000 (Coulson, “Impact”).
Common Core was supposed to be different. It began in 2008, when Arizona Governor
Janet Napolitano, the director of the National Governors Association (NGA) Educational

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Policy Division, created a taskforce of governors, education leaders, and corporate CEOs to
recommend changes in math and science education. The Ur-document for CCSSI was the
taskforce report. After the report was issued, the NGA, the Council of Chief State School
Officers (CCSSO), and Achieve, Inc. (all funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)
“came together to make sure the goals of the report became reality” (Bidwell). These groups
developed the Common Core standards for math (CCMS) and English Language Arts
(ELA).
David Coleman, a businessman with a Masters degree in classical philosophy, but no
teaching experience, was the lead architect of the ELA standards. Coleman’s friend and
business partner, Dr. Jason Zimba, was a lead author of the CCMS (Resmovits). Coleman
has since become president of the College Board where, in accordance with Bill Gates’
plans, he is overseeing the revision of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to bring it into
line with the Core. These changes in the SAT are seen as crucial since the methods
embedded in the standards would thereby be codified in tests for college admission.
Changing the admissions tests effectively forces states to change their curricula or else see
their students refused admission to college. Phelps and Milgram write, “the greatest harm
to higher education may accrue from the alignment of the SAT to Common Core’s high
school standards, converting the SAT from an adaptable test predictive of college work to
an inflexible retrospective test aligned to and locking in a low level of mathematics” (5). The
same is true for the ELA and eventually the history standards. Gates has been very open
about this.
Bill Gates has been a driving force behind the CCSSI. In addition to creating and
funding Achieve, Inc. to draft the standards, he has lobbied state and federal governments
to assure ongoing funding and compliance with the requirements. On July 21, 2009, a
month after receiving a public commitment from 46 state governors and CCSSOs — and a
full year before the final draft of the standards had even been written — Gates told the
National Conference of State Legislatures:

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We’ll know we’ve succeeded when the curriculum and the tests are aligned to these
standards. Secretary [of Education] Arne Duncan recently announced that $350
million of the stimulus package will be used to create just these kinds of tests —
next-generation assessments aligned to the common core. When the tests are aligned
to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well — and that will
unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time,
there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid
learn and every teacher get better … Common standards define what the students
need to learn; robust data systems tell us whether they’re learning it — and they tell
us a whole lot more than that … The stimulus package contains funding for
longitudinal data systems; I hope you will use this funding to support systems that
track student performance from early childhood education through high school and
college and into the workplace … All states and districts should collect common data
on teachers and students. We need to define the data in a standardized way, we need
to collect all of it for all of our students … Of course, if you do build this system and
get this data, you may have to deal with people who don’t want you to use it.
“Dealing with people” who do not want strangers using their children’s data sounds a bit
ominous, but at least Gates was honest about the creation of a huge captive market,
tracked by a sophisticated data collection regime, and paid for with billions of taxpayer
dollars. He was also clear about the standards being inextricably linked to curricula and
college admissions. Despite Gates’ candor on some issues, the transparency and openness
of the process used to create the standards is debatable, since deliberations were cloaked in
secrecy. While confidentiality is common in test preparation, the CCSSI is public policy,
which normally requires and benefits from the input of the people most affected by
proposed changes. The authors of the Core may have reasoned (correctly) that if the states,
the public, and dissenting academics understood the standards they would have strangled
the CCSSI in its crib. The authors may have been deceptive in this, but the states also

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share the blame for failing to do their due diligence before joining.
According to the Huffington Post, after developing the standards “with help from the
Gates Foundation, they received a new, powerful — but in retrospect, potentially
detrimental — boost in 2009. That year, the Obama administration incentivized higher
learning standards with billions of dollars in its Race to the Top [RTTT] competition, and
recession-stunned states signed on to the Core” (Resmovits). In the words of another
reporter:
[Forty] state departments of education offered to accept this complete overhaul of
their schools’ curricula and tests more than five months before the actual curriculum
requirements were published in June 2010 and two months before even a draft was
made publicly available. Taxpayers still await the final version of these new national
tests. (Pullman, “Common Core”)
The funding for RTTT alone, announced in July 2009, was $4.35 billion dollars not
including the billions of state and local tax dollars used to implement CCSSI (“Obama’s”).
To receive federal funding, states were required to adopt the standards and join one of two
approved assessment consortia: Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and
Careers (PARCC), or the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). These
consortia will oversee high-stakes testing beginning in 2014-15. Taxes flow from all states
to the federal government, which then doles out funding. The U.S. Department of
Education (DOE) withheld funds from states that did not submit to CCSSI, and PARCC or
SBAC, so those states are forced to subsidize the states that obeyed. Initially, 46 states and
Washington, D.C. agreed. Minnesota, Nebraska, Virginia, and Texas refused. Since then,
nine states (Indiana, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Kansas, Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Utah, and
Oklahoma) have quit the testing consortia, and Kentucky, Iowa, North Carolina, and
Michigan are considering withdrawing (Hart). Many school districts have spent millions of
dollars on new Core-aligned textbooks; that money is gone, which further locks them into
the untried standards. Supporters say CCSSI is state-led and voluntary; critics say federal

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funding is intimidation and bribery.
To supporters, Common Core is simply long-overdue, commonsense reform. The Gates
Foundation has spent a prodigious amount of money to develop standards and materials
they say will improve education. The NGA and CCSSO have lent the effort their prestige
and support. The U.S. DOE has rewarded states that adopt CCSSI with billions of tax
dollars, and punished states that have not. Education bureaucrats in every state have
advocated on its behalf. The mainstream media have been supportive. Large corporations
such as Exxon-Mobil, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Houghton-Mifflin, and Pearson, to name
but a few, have invested heavily in curriculum and infrastructure to implement CCSSI.
The initial marketing was as slick as anything ever produced by Madison Avenue. Yet,
despite the support of powerful elites in government, big business, academia, and the
media, the CCSSI is foundering. Backers are lashing out, but attempts to discredit critics
sound increasingly desperate.
In November 2013, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told a CCSSO meeting
“he found it ‘fascinating’ that some of the opposition to the [CCSSI] has come from ‘white
suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they
were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were’” (Strauss). Duncan
neither answered specific criticisms, nor explained what the race of critics had to do with
the validity of their opinions. Strauss writes:
Yes, he really said that … Whichever side you fall on regarding the Core’s academic
value, there is no question that their implementation in many areas has been
miserable — so miserable that American Federation of Teachers President Randi
Weingarten, a Core supporter, recently compared it to another particularly troubled
rollout: ‘You think Obamacare implementation is bad? The implementation of
Common Core is far worse.’
In May 2014, opponents of the CCSSI were derided by the Southern Poverty Law
Center (SPLC) as a right-wing conspiracy of “so-called education authorities who are really

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evangelical preachers; extremist libertarians; politicians who don’t believe in publicly
supported education or modern science; and ex-teachers who left schools because they
weren’t allowed to bring Jesus into the curriculum” (25). The SPLC did not answer specific
criticisms, but they were quite cross with Christians. Yet, just five months later, according
to National Public Radio, polling by the professional educator group Phi Delta Kappa
(PDK) and Gallup revealed that:
Last year, two-thirds of Americans had not heard of the standards. This year, more
than 80 percent said they know at least a little about Common Core. And they don’t
like what they hear — 60 percent of those surveyed said they oppose [it] … ‘Given
the increased media coverage this year, we were not surprised that an overwhelming
majority of Americans have heard about [CCSSI], but we were surprised by the level
of opposition,’ PDK CEO William Bushaw said in a statement. ‘Supporters of the
standards, and educators in particular, face a growing challenge in explaining why
they believe the standards are in the best interest of students in the United States.’
(O’Connor)
That is a considerably larger group than the SPLC described. Opposition may have
started with conservative parents, but it has since spread to teachers and their unions —
groups the media are loath to dismiss. We begin by examining the math standards.
Part 2: The Standards
School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English
and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored … Why learn
anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?
— Ray Bradbury
53

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Groovy Math: Common Core Math Standards (CCMS)
There are two types of people in math in my judgment. There are the kind of groovy,
understanding people, then there are the mean, rote people —
David Coleman, in Phelps
and Milgram 9
Coleman sums up the divide perfectly — on the one hand, progressives believe in the
superior virtue of their intentions; on the other, traditional teachers rely on their
experience (for an excellent history and analysis of the “math wars” past and present, see
Garelick). Traditionalists believe that learning requires high standards, hard work, and
memorizing the times table. Automaticity has long been seen as crucial for higher math
skills. Progressives believe in Rousseau and Dewey’s model of discovery learning in which
students naturally and effortlessly acquire understanding and skills. Schools of education
focus more on how to “engage students” with fun and games than they do on developing
prospective teachers into subject matter experts. Craigen and Garelick say the reformers
are wrong:
‘In the past students were taught by rote; we [the reformers] teach understanding.’
First, ‘rote’ literally means ‘repetition’ — and this is a good idea, not a bad one.
Second, it is simply false that teaching was without understanding — by design, in
any case — in the past. There have always been teachers who taught math poorly or
neglected to include a conceptual context. This does not mean that conventional
math was/is never taught well.
According to many math experts, the reform math in CCMS does not add up. They say
the standards fail to prepare students for careers in science, technology, engineering, and
math (STEM), and are a retreat from current best practice in many states. Many parents,
children, and teachers are baffled by the curriculum, worksheets, and tests developed to
meet the standards and have sided with the traditionalists.
Dr. James Milgram, the only mathematician among the 25 members of the

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CCSSO/NGA Validation Committee, is professor of mathematics
emeritus
at Stanford
University, and served on the Advisory Board of NASA. As he told the Texas legislature in
2011, he refused to sign off on the standards because other participants on the committee
wanted to make them as “unchallenging as possible” and to make “sure their favorite topics
were present, and handled the way they like” (“Prof.”). He specifically stated that, “by the
end of fifth grade the material being covered … is more than a year behind most high
achieving countries … By the end of seventh grade Core Standards are roughly two years
behind” (“Prof.”). The standards delay or eliminate high school requirements in Algebra I,
Geometry, and Algebra II. While most successful countries expect high school graduates to
have passed Calculus, the CCMS do not mention it. He continued:
Currently, about 40% of entering college freshmen have to take remedial
mathematics. For such students there is less than a 2% chance they will ever
successfully take a college calculus course. Calculus is required to major in
essentially all of the most critical areas: engineering, economics, medicine, computer
science, [and] the sciences. (“Prof.”)
He went on to mention “an extremely unusual approach to geometry from grade 7 on,”
noting, “the most likely outcome of the [CCMS] geometry standards is the complete
suppression of the key topics in Euclidean geometry including proofs and deductive
reasoning” (“Prof.”).
In a white paper titled “Lowering the Bar: How Common Core Math fails to prepare
high school students for STEM,” Milgram joined Sandra Stotsky in tackling the issue of
whether or not the standards are capable of accomplishing their declared goal of making
American students college- and career-ready. Stotsky is professor of education reform
emerita
at Arkansas University, a former member of the CCSSO/NGA Validation
Committee, and former Senior Associate Commissioner at the Massachusetts DOE where
she was in charge of developing that state’s leading ELA program. The literature-heavy
curriculum she developed for Massachusetts is credited with the state’s first-place ranking

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in national reading scores. Like Milgram, she refused to sign on to the final Core standards.
Milgram and Stotsky’s paper details a disagreement over comments made by Jason
Zimba, one of the lead writers of the CCMS. All citations in this paragraph refer to their
report. In 2010, Zimba told the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary
Education that “the concept of college readiness [in the standards] is minimal and focuses
on non-selective colleges” (2). In August 2013, Zimba recanted and has since disavowed the
minutes of the meeting, claiming he was misquoted. He was apparently unaware that a
video of the meeting existed. He may also have forgotten his exchange in that meeting with
Stotsky, who was a member of the board. In his opening remarks, Zimba said, “We have
agreement to the extent that it’s a fuzzy definition, that the minimally college-ready
student is a student who passed Algebra II” (4-5). When Stotsky asked him to clarify his
remarks he stated, “Well, for the colleges most kids go to, but not for the colleges most
parents aspire to” (5). Stotsky: “‘Not for STEM? Not for international competitiveness?’
Zimba … ‘Not only not for STEM, it’s also not for selective colleges … whether you are
going to be an engineer or not, you’d better have precalculus’ … Stotsky then summarized
her objections to this minimalist definition [in] … standards labeled as making students
college-ready” (5). In their paper, Milgram and Stotsky clearly state that they refused to
sign off on the standards because the standards are not rigorous and do not do what they
purport to do, despite repeated assurances to the contrary.
Milgram also coauthored a white paper with Richard Phelps titled “The Revenge of
K-12: How Common Core and the new SAT lower college standards in the U.S.” Phelps is
the author of four books on standardized testing and is the founder of the Nonpartisan
Education Review. Their report details many discrepancies between the declared values of
the CCSSI and the actual standards. All citations in the following two paragraphs refer to
their report. Phelps and Milgram are critical of the lack of qualifications of the lead writers
of the standards. In particular, they note that Coleman and Zimba were former business
partners and that Coleman, who is now president of the College Board, has “no teaching

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experience in K-12 or above” (11). Furthermore, Zimba “had never written K-12 standards
before or studied the standards of high-achieving countries … Both he and Coleman were
likely selected to be standards writers by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation” (11). This
last point was necessarily unclear since the whole process has been secret. Other lead
writers for CCMS and ELA, though well connected through the Gates Foundation, were
similarly ill equipped for writing usable standards. Phelps and Milgram write that, “The
CCMS ended up as a political compromise. The document was designed to look attractive
to both education schools and content experts. However, in mathematics, these are mostly
incompatible objectives” (8). They conclude that the standards are “poorly written and very
confusing” (26).
Yet another issue raised by Phelps and Milgram is the ruinous effect of likely changes in
the SAT. There are two kinds of tests, they write, “Achievement tests are retrospective,
they measure knowledge already learned, whereas aptitude tests are predictive, measuring
readiness for future activities” (16). The two types of tests have different purposes and
measure different, though overlapping, skill sets. To create a high-quality aptitude test, the
makers correlate items on the test with later performance. They explain the key
differences:
Predictive tests can be periodically adjusted to optimize their predictive validity
(tossing poorly predictive test items and drafting new ones); retrospective tests are
less flexible — their test items must cover the high school content domain, whether
or not they are predictive. Further, in the case of … PARCC and SBAC, they are
required to test the material listed in the … standards. (16)
Since its inception, the SAT has been a predictive test, something that Coleman will
change at the College Board. Phelps and Milgram write, “On March 5, 2014, Coleman
announced planned changes in the Mathematics SAT” (15). While the precise questions
have yet to be unveiled, “it is worth noting the promised changes … appear to be close to
what the 1989 and 2000 NCTM standards were asking for, a move away from assessing

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mathematical skills and techniques to assessing ideas
about
mathematics from a
philosophical perspective” (15, italics in original). This does not bode well, since the NCTM
standards to which they refer “met catastrophic failure after lowering outcomes in every
state that attempted” to implement them (8). According to Phelps and Milgram, reform
math was too groovy even for California: “The NCTM standards were adopted there in
1992. By 1996 the resulting problems had become so acute that a rebellion led by parents
and the state’s high tech industries forced the state to create new standards” (8); Maryland
and Kentucky suffered similar fates in the 1990s (12). They also found the standards
inferior to “Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, [and] the Netherlands” (21). Einstein said that
insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
Ze’ev Wurman is a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was
a senior policy advisor at the U.S. DOE (2007-09), and served on the California Academic
Content Standards Commission to evaluate the CCMS in 2010. He is also an executive at a
Silicon Valley semiconductor start-up company (Wurman). With James Milgram he
co-authored a chapter in a forth-coming anthology titled “An Academic Fraud: Pretending
to Rigor: The Common Core Mathematics Standards” (Wood, “Common Complaints”). In
testimony to the Ohio legislature on August 20, 2014, Wurman made two main points:
[1] That the Common Core’s reduced rigor in K-8 will directly lead to reduced
enrollment particularly of disadvantaged and minority students in advanced
mathematics courses in high school [and] … [2] that the Next Generation Science
Standards (NGSS) developed by Achieve … consist of low-level science expectations
that do not promote the necessary skills for developing scientists and technologists.
They are geared to making students into technology consumers rather than
technology developers.
Wurman went on to cite specific problems with the math standards. He stated that
early in the development process CCSSO, NGA, and Achieve, Inc. supported grade-8
Algebra I classes. He noted the support of civil rights leader Robert Moses and President

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Bill Clinton for this effort, and the progress made between 1990 and 2008 as the number of
students enrolled in grade-8 Algebra I classes doubled. This progress was made possible by
improved arithmetic classes in K-7. “Yet when the Common Core standards were
published a little more than a year later, in the summer of 2010, they firmly placed the first
algebra course in…the high school” (Wurman).
Wurman was equally disappointed with the NGSS, developed by Achieve, Inc. Wurman
is a self-described “science guy” from Silicon Valley and he thought the new Core standards
would help produce new generations of scientifically-minded students ready to take on the
challenge of advanced scientific studies and work. What he found instead was that “not
only [don’t] the NGSS expect students to master advanced science, [they don’t] even
prepare students for subsequent taking of advanced science courses” (Wurman).
Specifically, he mentioned the lack of rigor in science courses, quoting the standards:
“NGSS do not define advanced work in the sciences” (Wurman). In addition, he pointed out
that anyone who wanted to take an advanced science class would need a higher level of
math skills than is taught in Common Core. Somehow, Achieve, Inc. failed to align math
and science courses within their own standards.
Wurman concludes with thoughts on why students are failing the new tests despite
lower standards:
One can reasonably ask: if the Common Core is truly dumbed down, why do the test
results from pilot states show many more students failing? This apparent
contradiction is easily explained once it is understood that while the new breed of
tests doesn’t ask much in terms of math knowledge, it expects students to answer in
particular ways and formats that are largely unfamiliar to teachers and students. In
other words the new tests are not about deeper or broader knowledge of math but
rather about the difficulty of guessing what the test makers had in mind and aping
the prescribed form of answers.
His point is attested to by examples provided by parents. In the summer of 2013,

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parents and teachers were introduced to Common Core in the run-up to high-stakes testing
scheduled for 2014-15. A YouTube video shows Amanda August, a curriculum coordinator
in Chicago, explaining to parents, “even if [students] said ‘3 x 4 was 11,’ if they were able to
explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer in, umm, words
and oral explanation, and they showed it in the picture but they just got the final number
wrong, we’re really more focused on the how” (Owens).
A fourth-grade teacher posted the following problems from a Houghton Mifflin
Assessment Guide: “Juanita wants to give bags of stickers to her friends. She wants to give
the same number of stickers to each friend. She’s not sure if she needs 4 bags or 6 bags of
stickers. How many stickers could she buy if there are no stickers left over?” (“Unreal”).
Here is another gem from the same source: “Elaine uses 19 connecting cubes to make a
model of a house. The house model is in the shape of a rectangle and is one cube high. How
many different ways could Elaine make the model of the house?”
Another parent provided this example from his daughter’s third-grade homework. The
task was to subtract 38 from 325. Students were told to use the “Counting-up Subtraction
Method” not the “Granny Method” of carrying numbers and borrowing (the implication
being that math is different for old people). The text explains, “subtracting 38 from 325 can
be derived by counting up. Raise 38 to 40, by going up 2. Raise 40 to 100 by going up 60.
Raise 100 to 300 by going up 200. Raise 300 to 325 by going up 25. Then add the jumps
together so that 2 + 60 + 200 + 25 = 287. That would be the answer” (Erickson).
It is troubling enough that the CCMS are pushing already failed reform math ideas,
dramatically changing the math education of American children, and lending themselves
to a revised SAT test all at the same time. What is even more disturbing is how Coleman,
Zimba, et al. blithely ignore critical feedback. The design flaws detailed above are so basic it
is hard to imagine anyone could miss them, much less self-proclaimed experts like the
College Board, CCSSO, NGA, SPLC, and Achieve, Inc. Yet, one of the most persistent and
frustrating problems in the debate over Common Core is that its supporters take it so

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much for granted that they are correct (morally, scientifically, and politically) that they do
not listen to feedback. They dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as ignorant, evil, or
both (“evil” is used advisedly, since critics are often called racists). When caught in glaring
mistakes or misrepresentations, they claim to be have been misunderstood and push on
regardless. They act as if they had all the answers and refuse to hear otherwise. In so doing,
they cut themselves off from a large group of people not all of whom are religious,
conservative, or racist. They not only reveal significant blind spots, but they also compound
the error by heaping scorn on opponents for their religion, politics, and/or race without
reading, let alone thinking about, what critics write. This is especially exasperating to
parents faced with the evidence of their own children’s homework. None of the math
examples above mentioned God or politics, and the only possible link to race was the girl
and her stickers, though why anyone would want to baffle poor Juanita is a mystery. The
ELA standards are even worse.
English Language Arts (ELA) Standards
If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry
him; give him one. Better yet, give him none … If the government is inefficient, top-heavy
and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. —
Ray Bradbury 58
The gulf between progressives and traditionalists centers in large part on our differing
views of human nature, society, and history. We can dodge this issue somewhat in math
and science, but it is more difficult when it comes to reading. For one thing, unlike with
math, religion is crucial in American literature and history. Whether or not one is
personally religious, it is undeniable that Christianity played a key role in seminal events
in American history, from our Pilgrim and Puritan roots, to the later Abolition and Civil
Rights Movements. After all, the “Dr.” in Dr. Martin Luther King is a doctorate in divinity.
Unfortunately, the strained treatment of religion is just one of the problems with the Core

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standards.
The ELA standards incorporate readings from a variety of subjects into English class
under “Appendix B: Test exemplars and sample performance tasks.” The standards
increase the percentage of informational texts, and decrease the percentage of literature, as
students get older. Moore writes:
On page five of the introduction to the Common Core English Standards, the authors
reproduce a chart that clearly illustrates the demise of the humanities. It shows
children in grade 4 reading 50% “informational” texts vs. literary texts, by grade 8
reading 55% informational texts, and by grade 12 reading 70% informational texts
and only 30% literature. (11)
Examples of informational texts are included in Appendix B of the ELA standards. All
page citations in this paragraph refer to that document. Not all of the texts are bad, but far
too many of them are. Most entries resemble the factoids on cereal boxes: random,
disembodied tidbits devoid of context or meaning. For grades 6-8 we find the “California
Invasive Plant Inventory, 2010” (99). For grades 9-10 we find the “U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency’s Recommended Levels of Insulation” (138). Grades 11-CCR [college-
career-ready] can look forward to “
FedViews
by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco,
2009,” complete with charts titled “Modest recovery to begin in Q3” (177), and “No link
between deficits and inflation” (178), though perhaps these are just misplaced exemplars of
science fiction. They also get a peek at “U.S. General Services Administration Executive
Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation
Management” (181). Dr. Atul Gawande contributes “The Cost Conundrum: Health Care
Costs in McAllen, Texas” (183). Spoiler alert: Texas is horrible, but Gawande assures
students that “President Barack Obama” is going to fix things. “In Washington, the aim of
health-care reform is not just to extend medical coverage to everybody but also to bring
costs under control” (183). Many entries read like political infomercials.
The creators of the ELA standards based their ratios of literature to information texts

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on the reading tests produced by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
As previously mentioned, Dr. Sandra Stotsky was in charge of the development of the
literature-heavy ELA curriculum for Massachusetts, a program widely credited with the
state’s first-place reading scores on the NAEP 2011 tests (National 51). She is highly
critical of the ELA’s approach. Bauerlein and Stotsky write:
Common Core’s architects have inaccurately and without warrant applied NAEP
percentages for passage types on its reading tests to the English and reading
curriculum, misleading teachers, administrators, and test developers, alike. (1)
Common Core makes repeated claims that its standards (presumably including the
50/50 division of literary and informational reading) are research-based. But we can
find no research cited in its own document to support its organizational framework
for reading. (25)
They continue, “NAEP never states that the percentages of types of reading in a
curriculum should reflect the percentages designed for a test” (7). Moreover, Bauerlein and
Stotsky take issue with both NAEP and the ELA for their assumptions about reading
comprehension. They cite the performance of Massachusetts on the NAEP 2011 reading
tests as evidence that the best way to improve reading skills is with literature, rather than
a curriculum of simplified texts. They say that students become college-ready by learning to
deal with complexity, not with informational texts. They write, “Complexity is laden with
literary features” (6). Alas, the scant literature that survives in the standards is twisted by
the academic literary criticism that dominates college English departments. Ellis writes,
[Academic literary critics] view the very idea of a canon of great works as an elitist
notion and even question whether there should be a distinction between literature
and other kinds of writing; that, too, is elitism. Their new view of human motivation
must astonish anyone who remembers the way humanists used to talk: for them
power is now the most basic factor in human motivation. In this grim view of
humanity, one central factor displaces and undermines the multiplicity of other

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motivations that we once used to think so important: love, loyalty, fulfillment,
ambition, achievement, friendship, intellectual curiosity, and so on. (9)
The great stories of our culture are twisted through the lenses of race, class, gender,
and sexual orientation then pushed on students too innocent to resist. To the reformers,
everything is about power. That jaded attitude cannot help but warp the minds of children
who do not yet realize that there is more to life than raw political domination of one’s
opponents. The great life lessons and transcendent beauty of literature is being sacrificed
on the altar of grievance mongering and identity politics. Here again, teachers are hindered
by their lack of training as subject matter experts.
Stotsky has observed, “the history of the secondary English curriculum in 20th-century
America suggests that the decline in readiness for college reading stems in large part from
an increasingly incoherent, less challenging literature curriculum from the 1960s onward.”
She suggested one reason is “the assignment of easier, shorter, and contemporary texts —
often in the name of multiculturalism.” Classics only become classic over time, a fact that
may exclude recent works. This upsets progressives who insist on texts by members of
under-represented groups. This might not be a problem if the criteria for selection were the
quality of the writing coupled with the author’s race, gender, or sexual orientation. On
those grounds any of the following recent authors would be excellent for students: Thomas
Sowell, Dinesh D’Souza, Bruce Bawer, Amy Chua, Michelle Malkin, Shelby Steele, Albert
Murray, Armando Valladares, Condoleezza Rice, Star Parker, Stanley Crouch, Orlando
Patterson, Clarence Thomas, Ben Chavis, Gabriel Rotello, Ward Connerly, Walter E.
Williams, or Yoani Sanchez. None of them would be acceptable, however, since the
progressive narrative eschews diversity of opinion. Choosing authors is difficult for any
curriculum, but all the more so when inclusion is based on ideology.
Dr. Terrence Moore describes the effects of this ideology in his book,
The Story-Killers
.
In it, he meticulously details the “absurdities, bias, and lost opportunities” (187) of an 11th
grade Common Core-aligned ELA textbook (Prentice Hall’s
The American Experience
). He

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also reviews the Teacher’s Edition. Many of the tasks in the book are labeled “critical
thinking” with suggested questions and answers for teachers. However, the text selections
and discussion questions are designed to elicit emotional, not intellectual, responses and to
lead students to prepackaged conclusions. What the textbook describes as critical thinking
is actually Critical Theory. Critical thinking requires students to formulate questions,
gather information from a variety of sources with different perspectives (taking into
account hidden agendas and possible bias), evaluate the truth of arguments, and make
informed judgments based on facts. Critical Theory assumes that Western and American
societies are unjust, and seeks to remedy this with direct action against targeted groups.
McLaren writes, “Critical pedagogy ruptures or destabilizes ideological imperatives of
white, patriarchal, capitalist society” (104). Critical Theory begins with the conclusions
already drawn for students, as is made clear in
The American Experience.
Moore writes, “The first image the students see for Unit 1 — A Gathering of Voices:
Literature of Early America, Beginnings to 1800 — is a painting of Europeans and Native
Americans floating down a river on a canoe” (189). The painting, “Radisson and
Groseilliers,” is accompanied by the text of an Iroquois hymn. The first question for
students is, “What does the quotation [the hymn] suggest about about the attitudes of the
period?” The suggested response: “the Iroquois … honored their heritage” (189). Next
question: “How does the painting suggest cooperative effort?” Suggested answer: “The
painting shows both Europeans and Native Americans engaged in a creative enterprise”
(189). Moore has questions of his own. Why start with French fur trappers? Why not begin
with Benjamin Franklin, or the Puritans, or someone connected to American literature?
The next fifteen pages of the textbook purport to provide some historical background that
might be useful if it were not flat wrong. For example, the text reads, “These Puritans, now
called Pilgrims [the text then describes an imaginary group]” (192). However, as Moore
points out, “The editors are actually conflating two different groups of settlers, the Pilgrims
who had fully separated from the Church of England and who landed at Plymouth, and the

23 Sower
Puritan non-separating Congregationalists of Massachusetts” (192).
This snapshot of the first twenty pages of a book intended for 17-year old high school
students is alarming. Keep in mind that these students will be voting in a year. To start
with, the editors of a textbook should know enough history to provide accurate context for
students, or they should keep silent. The answers in the Teacher’s Edition are simplistic
bordering on moronic, and reach conclusions that are unsupported by the material
presented (e.g., how the Iroquois felt about their heritage, and fur trapping being a
“creative enterprise”). If the editors intended for students to conclude that paddling a canoe
is a cooperative effort it is almost funny. The teacher’s answers sound more like a child’s
imagination of wilderness life than scholarly observations. They also show the teacher
leading students to predetermined conclusions rather than helping students look for their
own answers. Taken together with mistaking Puritans for Pilgrims, one gets the
impression the editors are winging it. Would that were all.
Moving on, students are introduced to Thomas Paine. The book reads, “Thomas Paine:
Essayist, Hero of the Revolution…Father of the Internet?”
Next to a silly cartoon of Paine drinking a cup of coffee and writing on a laptop we
are told that John Katz, writing in
Wired News
in 1995, claimed that Paine’s ‘ideas
about communications … are visible every time one modem shakes hands with
another.’ (Moore 193)
The Teacher’s Edition directs teachers to “Ask what issue Thomas Paine might sound
off about if he were writing a blog on the Internet today. Answer: Paine would probably be
concerned with economic issues, such as distribution of income. He might also write about
the seemingly unreasonable behavior of some political leaders” (193). The editors once
again draw political and economic conclusions for students that are absent from the text.
Rather than explore Paine’s social and political ideas in the context of the 18th century, the
editors ask students to discuss 21st-century events that interest the editors. Students could
learn a great deal about rhetoric and philosophy from the debate between Paine and

24 Sower
Edmund Burke, but that would not serve the editors’ political agenda.
From Iroquois hymns, French fur trappers, and Paine’s Internet café, the editors move
to “Recent Scholarship,” a factoid-type segment that appears at intervals throughout the
book. The first one is an essay by the unit author, Professor William L. Andrews, who is
also a co-editor of
The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature
. Andrews links
Patrick Henry’s 1775 “Liberty or Death” speech to the professor’s own experience as a
Virginia schoolchild: “My teacher didn’t mention that all of Virginia’s great heroes,
including Washington and Jefferson, were slaveholders as well” (Moore 194). The Teacher’s
Edition asks teachers to lead a discussion of America’s founding principles based on
Andrews’ essay (which is all the students have to go on since they have yet to read any of
the Founding Fathers). Second, teachers elicit “examples of behaviors of early American
leaders that did not support these ideals” (Moore 195). Third, “Have students offer ideas or
judgments about the main question: Has the United States become the country early
citizens imagined?” (Moore 195). English teachers will lead these discussions in the total
absence of reliable historical background, based solely on kids’ personal experiences, to
predictable and carefully scripted conclusions. At best, this is a lost opportunity, as there
are many examples of contemporaneous Christian sermons and writings against slavery
that students could read.
On a personal note, I went to elementary school in Silver Spring, Maryland, at the same
time (1956-62) that Mr. Andrews was going to school in nearby Virginia. A photo of the
slave quarters at Monticello circa 1960 is online (“Slave”), and Mount Vernon’s slave
quarters opened to the public in 1962 (“George”). My class visited both places on school field
trips. Given that school integration, centennial reenactments of Civil War battles
throughout Virginia and Maryland, and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington were
daily staples of local news in the early sixties, it strains credulity that anyone at that time
and place could have been unaware that Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. As
Groucho Marx said, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” (
Duck Soup
). Orwell

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said it even better: “The history books say that life before the Revolution was completely
different from what it is now. There was the most terrible oppression, injustice, poverty —
worse than anything we can imagine” (202). Slavery was an abomination; there is no need
to embellish the tale by telling children it was also a secret shame revealed now at long last
by the glorious Party.
At least the students are spared the advertising:
Between each short section, the Teacher’s Edition has several pages that look like a
sales pitch for further Common Core ‘resources’ used in teaching. One finds Common
Core Companions and Reader’s Notebooks and online features, including Spanish
and English summaries, graphic organizers, and ready-made examinations. All this
is to say that teachers really do not have to teach any more, nor attend to the more
laborious parts of teaching, such as making one’s own examinations. The whole
package is just handed to teachers — for a price. (Moore 197)
The book wanders from topic to topic, seldom dwelling on anything for long. The first
pieces in the text are creation stories (in the original Colonial English?) titled “The Earth on
Turtle’s Back,” “When Grizzlies Walked Upright,” and “The Navaho Origin Legend.” The
Teacher’s Edition instructs teachers to “ask ‘what other sources they know that take on the
challenge of explaining’ where the people of the earth come from. Students might answer
with ‘sacred texts such as the Bible as well as the secular work of geneticists and molecular
biologists’” (Moore 197). “After another break in the Teacher’s Edition peddling Common
Core paraphernalia, we get to read the Iroquois Constitution” (Moore 198). The complete
text of the U.S. Constitution is not included in the textbook. At long last, Moore writes:
On page 58 we encounter the first selection originally written in English by someone
who lived before the twentieth century … William Bradford’s famous
Of Plymouth
Plantation
… teachers are instructed to ‘discuss the idea that some of today’s
immigrants to the United States also face hardships’ … students should engage in
the activity of conducting research into the ‘obstacles immigrants face today — say,

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learning the language, finding housing, finding employment, and dealing with
earlier settlers in the area.’ (199)
The remaining “critical thinking” questions on immigration have nothing to do with
Colonial America, but once again focus on the editors’ 21st-century concerns. God forbid, so
to speak, that the religious content of Bradford’s piece should be discussed. The most
egregious example of text selection in this unit, however, is Benjamin Franklin vs. Sandra
Cisneros.
The American Experience
is 1,467 pages long, weighs 6.4 pounds (3 kg.), and costs
$112.85. It is not a book that students slip into their pocket in case they have a few minutes
to kill on the bus.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
, on the other hand, is 130
pages long, weighs nine ounces (255 gr.), and costs less than $5.00. Better yet, the Kindle
version weighs nothing, and can be downloaded for free to most cellphones. The editors
squeeze just five-and-a-half pages of Franklin’s autobiography into the book (less than
four-tenths of one-percent of the 1,467-page tome). This puzzles Moore:
The editors of the textbook must surely be making the best use of the other pages.
That brings us to the question of why the same number given to Franklin would be
consumed in this chapter designated “A Nation is Born” by the autobiographical
account of Sandra Cisneros called ‘Straw into Gold: The Metamorphosis of the
Everyday.’ Now maybe Ms. Cisneros is a talented writer … The real question is
whether she should be in an American literature textbook assigned to tens, or
hundreds, of thousands of students whose teachers know they must teach this
reading or risk sending their students into a standardized exam unprepared for what
will surely appear given the predilections of the testing agency. (218-19)
Franklin’s
Autobiography
has been a staple of English courses since the 19th century,
often appearing in textbooks such as
McGuffey’s Readers
, which were published from 1836
until 1920. They were written especially for the elementary schoolchildren of new
immigrant families then settling the Midwest and Western states. They were designed to

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create common cultural understandings and included lengthy excerpts of literary classics
like Aesop, Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
, Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen,
Daniel Defoe, and Longfellow’s
Hiawatha
. They also included patriotic selections from
Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Lord Tennyson. The series sold 122 million
copies, second only to the Bible. John Dewey and his acolytes at Columbia’s Teachers
College disliked its patriotic and moralistic tone, deriding it as irrelevant to modern
children
.
They led the movement to replace it with “Dick and Jane” books that used the
“whole language” approach and sight words, which they said was more scientific (Sower,
Strains
18). The complexity of
McGuffey’s Readers
shames
The American Experience
. A
95-year-old great-grandmother with a 6th-grade education is more literate than a
15-year-old 10th-grader today.
The problem is that classic literature is sacrificed in deference to new work of dubious
quality. Cisneros is undoubtedly a wonderful person, and may be a terrific role model, but
her autobiographical writing is not on a par with Benjamin Franklin’s, nor is it from the
time period the unit claims to cover. The same goes for Professor Andrews. In the unit
titled “A Nation is Born,” only 23 out of 111 pages include anything written by the
Founding Fathers. The remainder is taken up with factoids, 21st-century commentary, and
“instruction in alleged literary analysis, reading strategies, and other aspects of two-bit
literary criticism” (Moore 223). This approach raises several questions. First, why are the
ELA authors reducing literature content in the absence of research? Second, how are texts
of both types selected? Is there a plan that connects readings that are sequenced
developmentally to move students from simpler to increasingly complex material; from
dependent to independent learning? Third, how are texts linked to courses in other subjects
within the curriculum? And finally, are teachers sufficiently knowledgeable about the
subject matter of the texts to lead meaningful reading activities? The answers are
discouraging.
In place of literature, students get personal opinions about current events written by

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recent authors selected for their ideological purity. The sequencing of literature is erratic
and distracting. They jump between eras and from one genre to another. Traditions,
themes, and authors are not explored in enough depth to give students a feel for the
material. The sequencing is not linked to history classes, so instead of reading Homer while
learning about ancient history and reading Mark Twain while studying American history,
students skip around at random. The social commentary of editors serves the interests of
multiculturalism and political correctness. It privileges issues of race, class, gender, and
sexual orientation at the expense of traditional topics like God, family, and country.
Female and minority students are encouraged to feel the resentment, anger, and
self-pity of permanent victims. White males are publicly shamed for events they had
nothing to do with. Little is said about independence, personal responsibility, self-reliance,
overcoming hardships, moral virtues, love, duty, or problem solving. The only values on
display are progressive platitudes. This is not new, but it is pernicious since it serves to
justify an aggrieved sense of entitlement in students. No one has ever had to teach
teenagers to say, “It’s not fair.” Critical theory and the critical reading it produces are
divisive and filled with jargon like “sites of conflict” (what used to be called classrooms),
“disputed knowledge” (meaning the politically correct version differs from the evidence),
and “different ways of knowing” (meaning that women are the same as men except when
they are better). The goals are anti-traditional and the thinking is critical only with a big
“C.” They destroy literature as surely as a flamethrower.
In
Fahrenheit 451
, firemen burn books to maintain social order. The people require
entertainment and relaxation, and the fireman’s job is to preserve domestic tranquility by
destroying books, especially ones that would disturb people by making them think. Montag,
a fireman, is fine with this until he meets Clarisse, an eccentric neighbor girl who has been
diagnosed at school as antisocial. She tells Montag about her classes:
We never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing,
bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That’s not social

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to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the
bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not. (Bradbury 27)
Clarisse could be talking about the ELA lessons described by Dr. Moore. He is not alone
in thinking that the new standards codify mediocrity in the quest for cosmic justice. Sondra
Stotsky also says the ELA standards are a confused and confusing jumble of political
correctness leavened with mind-numbing informational texts. It is no surprise that the
ELA standards are more overtly political than the math standards, but their vacuity, utter
lack of context, and disconnect from other subject areas is startling. As with the CCMS, the
ELA standards are a product of progressive doctrine based on the social reconstruction
theories of Rousseau and Dewey.
Unlike the math standards, however, the ELA are also fed by more recent work.
Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire’s 1970 book,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
, is on the reading
list of America’s best schools of education (Stern). Also on those lists are Henry Giroux, Bill
Ayers, Peter McLaren, and Jonathan Kozol, all of whom are strong advocates of Liberation
or Critical Pedagogy (Steiner). Steiner and Rozen studied sixteen leading schools of
education, including Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Wisconsin, and UCLA and found that
“only one course syllabus, in one program … offered any readings presenting [a]
countervailing view” (129). These professors of education, like Freire, are fulsome admirers
of Ché Guevara. This is not to say that American teachers are communists, only that
anyone who has gone to an American school of education has been thoroughly
indoctrinated in Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and similar fashionable nonsense.
While rehashing communist revolution is beyond the scope of this paper, the prevalence of
these views among the people teaching our children demands a brief mention here.
Humberto Fontova, a Cuban exile, credits Ché personally with the murder of 1,892 men,
women, and children (including high school and university students), and he devotes 45
pages of his book to the details. Ché called his use of the firing squad the “pedagogy of the
paredon
” (Fontova 84).
Paredon
is Spanish for “wall,” as in, “up against.” Fontova quotes

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Ché as saying in 1959, when he was chief of the
Comisiòn Depuradora
(Cleansing
Commission), “Our mission isn’t to uphold legal guarantees, it’s to carry forth a revolution.
For that we must establish the pedagogy of the firing squad” (88; also see Courtois, et al. 21,
648, 651-654). McLaren helpfully elaborates on critical pedagogy and how it can go soft:
Critical pedagogy is a way of thinking about, negotiating, and transforming the
relationship among classroom teaching, the production of knowledge, the
institutional structures of the school, and the social and material relations of the
wider community, society, and nation-state … Developed by progressive educators
and researchers attempting to eliminate inequalities on the basis of social class, it
has sparked up to the present a wide array of antisexist, antiracist, and
antihomophobic, classroom-based curricula and policy initiatives … Though critics of
critical pedagogy often decry this educational approach for its idealist
multiculturalism, its supporters, including the late Paolo Freire, have often
complained that critical pedagogy has too often been domesticated and reduced to
student-directed learning approaches devoid of social critique and a revolutionary
agenda. (35)
In his view, teachers spend too much time thinking about students and not enough on
fomenting revolution. McLaren need not worry — the pedagogy of the
paredon
suffuses the
ELA standards. Suffice it to say the professors are at odds with more traditional views. One
reason most of the rest of us admire characters like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel,
Lech Walesa, and Aung San Suu Kyi is that we recognize the courage it takes for someone
living in tyranny to speak up for liberty. What, then, are we to make of those who live in
freedom but defend despotism?
One of the funny things (funny strange, not funny ha-ha) about talking with Cuban
refugees or people who lived in communist Eastern Europe is that you never hear them
speak about the wonders of the Party or the State, or how “true communism” was never
really tried. For example, a Romanian friend who is now living in England once asked me,

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“Why did America and Britain fight the Cold War for fifty years, sacrifice so much to win,
and then change their governments to the Soviet model?” Hard to say, but it does
underscore the appeal of the utopian chimera. Perhaps the dream of perfect social justice,
with peace, prosperity, and happiness for all is so beguiling that a century of failure means
nothing unless you were forced to live your life in the Pied Piper’s nightmare.
The College Board’s AP U.S. History Framework
‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past.’
— George Orwell 88
In American high schools, students may take advanced placement (AP) courses and
receive college credit at participating universities around the country. The Advanced
Placement U.S. History (APUSH) course is one of the most popular. The College Board sets
the standards for the course. U.S. history standards have been a contentious issue for
decades. On January 18, 1995, the U.S. Senate passed a sense of the Senate resolution (by
a vote of 99 to 1) condemning the standards proposed by the National Center for History in
the Schools at UCLA (Bennetta). The set of standards proposed at that time were widely
believed to be dead, but that was wishful thinking. The standards were watered down
somewhat and quietly re-released in 1996. Since then, they have been in wide use. In
August 2014, Wood wrote, “Today we have lots of historians who move with ease through
the narrative of America as a nation founded on greed, oppression, privilege, racism, and
heedless exploitation of the environment. The idea of America as a nation founded on the
pursuit of freedom and equality is presented mainly as a myth ever in need of more
repudiation.”
Much of the alternative scholarship stems from Howard Zinn’s
A People’s History of the
United States
. In writing his revisionist history, Zinn “declared that it was his goal to
‘awaken a great consciousness of class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality, and

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national arrogance’” (Ketcham, et al. 13). Zinn and like-minded historians have been
repeatedly debunked, but they keep resurfacing. Not all of Zinn’s critics have been from the
Right.
Dissent
Magazine
, hailed on its homepage by the New York Times as “A pillar of
leftist intellectual provocation,” is hardly conservative. Michael Kazin, an editor of
Dissent
who also teaches history at Georgetown University, had this to say about Zinn’s work:
Zinn’s big book is quite unworthy of such fame and influence.
A People’s History
is
bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions. Zinn reduces the past to a
Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a
leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the
legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live? His failure is grounded in a
premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s Web site than to a work of
scholarship. According to Zinn, ‘99 percent’ of Americans share a ‘commonality’
that is profoundly at odds with the interests of their rulers. And knowledge of that
awesome fact is ‘exactly what the governments of the United States, and the
wealthy elite allied to them — from the Founding Fathers to now — have tried
their best to prevent.’ … The fact that his text barely mentions either conservatism
or Christianity is telling. The former is nothing but an excuse to grind the poor
(‘conservatism’ itself doesn’t even appear in the index), while religion gets a brief
mention during Anne Hutchinson’s rebellion against the Puritan fathers and then
vanishes from the next 370 years of history.
Building on Zinn’s efforts, New York University historian, Thomas Bender, collaborated
with the College Board through its Advisory Board on Teaching the U.S. History Survey
Course. Bender was instrumental in the committee that drafted the La Pietra Report in
2000, with help from Francesca Lopez Civeira, of the University of Havana, and another 78
anti-American historians. Kurtz writes, “A conclave of historians with a left-wing foreign
policy agenda, a third of them from foreign countries, seems an odd inspiration for the
ostensibly non-partisan College Board’s redesign of the AP U.S. History Exam. Yet that is

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exactly what the La Pietra conference and its report became.” Under Bender’s guidance,
the College Board has produced standards inimical to American values and American
exceptionalism, and antagonistic to traditional narratives of American history. Educators
and observers familiar with Zinn, Bender, and La Pietra sounded the alarm and many
school districts took action to stop or at least review implementation of the new standards.
Critics’ complaints about the anti-American ideology enshrined in the new American
history standards have been ignored. As Peter Wood wrote in August 2014, “The College
Board’s response to the criticism has so far been, ‘Who me?’ We are told APUSH is the work
of scholars whose only agenda was to create a good course. This doesn’t ring true. APUSH
is hard-edged in its assault on the idea of American exceptionalism, its blanking out of
whole eras, and its celebration of progressive orthodoxies.” Pullman reported on an
exchange of open letters in August 2014 from Larry Krieger (former AP history teacher)
and Jane Robbins, written to David Coleman (“Open letters”). The pair made a series of
specific criticisms of the contents of the new test. Coleman brushed off their points while
claiming to have the deepest respect for American history. Shortly thereafter, Coleman
took actions in Colorado that may more accurately reflect his beliefs.
In August 2014, the school board of Jefferson County, Colorado, entertained a motion to
review the new AP standards. Teachers began a sickout, claiming the board was
attempting to censor the use of Zinn’s textbook in the course, and encouraged students to
join them. Protests became loud, disruptive, and threatening. On September 24, 2014, the
Jefferson County Sheriff began an investigation into violent threats made against the
children of board members (Hayden). Two days later the College Board applauded the
actions of the students and threatened to drop the district from AP testing. Coleman’s
College Board wrote:
The College Board’s Advanced Placement Program® supports the actions taken by
students in Jefferson County, Colorado to protest a school board member’s request to
censor aspects of the AP U.S. History course. The board member claims that some

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historical content in the course ‘encouraged or condoned civil disorder, social strife, or
disregard for the law.’ These students recognize that the social order can – and
sometimes must – be disrupted in the pursuit of liberty and justice. Civil disorder and
social strife are at the patriotic heart of American history … if a school or district
censors essential concepts from an Advanced Placement course, that course can no
longer bear the ‘AP’ designation. (Berry, “College Board”)
Thus, the College Board “waved the bloody shirt” and became an active party in the kind
of chaos (in revolutionary argot, “direct action for social justice”) the school board was
concerned about in the first place. It has since emerged that the teachers’ real complaint is a
merit-pay system the board is considering. Far from educating students, the teachers and
the College Board are using students as pawns in their efforts to wrest control of public
schools from lawfully elected local officials. Disrupting school board meetings, walking out of
school, and threatening the children of board members with violence are the kind of
revolutionary action approved by Freire, McLaren, and Ché. They are also tactics
reminiscent of the Brownshirts. The protesters insist on the right to rewrite history to fit
their ideological preferences.
Rewriting history is a time-honored tradition among the anointed, and not just in
Orwell’s Oceania, the old Soviet Union, or American academia. To get an idea of how
pervasive the progressives’ revision of history has become, talk with some young people.
Propose to them the following ideas and see what they say: Black Republicans founded the
NAACP in 1909. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a lifelong Republican whose father endorsed
Nixon for president in 1960. The Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964 were filibustered by
Democrat Senators including Robert Byrd (Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, and Dean
of the Senate until his death in 2010), J. William Fulbright (for whom the scholarship is
named, and the long-time mentor of Bill Clinton), Al Gore, Sr. (whose son lectures about
inconvenient truths), and Sam Ervin (chairman of the Watergate committee). Of the
twenty-one Democrat Senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, only Strom

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Thurmond of South Carolina ever became a Republican. Eighty-one percent of Republicans
in the House and Senate voted for the legislation versus just sixty-four percent of
Democrats. Even in Japan, students will argue that these easily verifiable facts are
impossible to believe. The students are right. Fifty years of propaganda does make the
truth impossible to believe. History is too important to leave to ideologues like Howard
Zinn, Thomas Bender, and the College Board.
The Common Core Standards for math, English, and history represent an audacious
power grab by the federal government and parties interested in overthrowing local control
of public education. Combined with the effects of the revised SAT, a small group of
ideologically motivated players are set to dictate to American families a new set of goals,
objectives, and activities in schools, whether parents and teachers like it or not. Private and
religious schools, as well as homeschoolers, will have no choice but to change the
curriculum studied by children in their care; failure to comply with the dictates of the
CCSSI would mean that students would have no chance of entering university after high
school. It is doubtful whether any of this is legal, let alone wise. In addition to ideology,
however, the CCSSI also poses questions of the rule of law, corruption, and human rights.
Part 3: Is this the best we can do?
Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the
work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by
criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. —
Milan Kundera 176
We must assume that the road to CCSSI was paved with good intentions. The idea of
common educational goals, a national curriculum to reach them, and a robust data
collection system to track it all must have made sense to Bill Gates, David Coleman, and
Jason Zimba. Surely they did not anticipate the reaction their plans elicited from some

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quarters. Unfortunately for them their efforts were banjaxed by their assumptions.
Unfortunately for the rest of us that does not mean that they will stop what they are doing
or change direction. Advocates claim Common Core is internationally benchmarked,
independent of the federal government, and based on research. As we have already seen, it
is none of those things. Advocates use buzzwords like 21st century, critical thinking, career-
and college-ready, higher-order thinking, and global competition. But naming a thing is not
the same as creating that thing. There are much better ways to build a curriculum than by
courting corporate sponsors and writing standards in secret. Supporters pooh-pooh
criticisms of the proposed data collection system as the product of their opponents’ fevered
imaginations, but their own words and government reports should alarm parents and
citizens alike.
The authors of CCSSI claim the effort is state-led. Legally speaking it should be since
federal laws “ban federal departments and agencies from directing, supervising, or
controlling elementary and secondary school curriculum, programs of instruction, and
instructional materials” (Eitel, et al. 1). Laws limiting the U.S. DOE include the
Elementary and Secondary School Act of 1965, the General Education Provisions Act of
1968, the Department of Education Organization Act of 1980, and the No Child Left
Behind Act of 2001. The CCSSI ignores those laws. Eitel, et al. write:
Actions taken by the Obama Administration signal an important policy shift in the
nation’s education policy … placing the nation on the road to federal direction over
elementary and secondary school curriculum and instruction … At the direction of
the present Administration … the Department has begun to slight statutory
constraints. Since 2009, through three major initiatives — the Race to the Top Fund,
the Race to the Top Assessment Program, and conditional NCLB waiver guidance —
the Department has created a system of discretionary grants and waivers that herds
state education authorities into accepting elementary and secondary school
standards and assessment favored by the Department. (1)

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Bill Gates and his paid experts at Achieve, Inc. may have begun by looking for ways to
enhance learning but, if so, they were soon overtaken by events. The program is now
overrun with Beltway lobbying firms staffed by well connected Republicans and Democrats
alike, and corporate sponsors like the publishing giant Pearson (the owners of Prentice Hall,
publishers of
The American Experience
). Michelle Malkin reports:
In December … the state of New York determined that Pearson’s nonprofit
foundation had abused the law by siphoning charitable assets to benefit its for-profit
arm in order to curry favor with the Common Core-peddling Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation. Pearson paid a $7.7 million settlement after the attorney general
concluded that the company’s charitable arm was marketing Common Core course
material it believed could be sold by the for-profit side for ‘tens of millions of dollars.’
After being smoked out, the Pearson Foundation sold the courses to its corporate
sibling for $15.1 million.
This is what is known as “The Chicago Way” — the pay for play practices perfected for
sixty years by the Daley Machine featuring crony capitalism, kickbacks, and sweetheart
government contracts. Clark reports a lucrative business arrangement for the Grow
Network founded by Coleman and Zimba that profited from cozy deals with Chicago Public
Schools (CPS). In 2004, they sold their business to McGraw Hill, which continues to service
the CPS. They sell copyrighted materials including “lesson plans, and curriculum resources
… identical to those now being used with Common Core” (Clark). Sandra Stotsky told a
reporter, “Because Common Core is run by private corporations and foundations, there can
be no Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filings or ‘sunshine laws’ to find out who got to
choose the people who actually wrote the standards. It’s completely non-transparent and
rather shady” (Berry, “Education expert”). We may never know the full extent of the
corruption, but it does suggest why people like Coleman and Zimba — connected, but with
no experience writing curricula — found themselves in such powerful positions. As one of
the richest men in the world, Gates did not need the money so one must believe he had no

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idea what his minions were up to. Still, he did say the standards open a “large base of
customers eager to buy products,” so we should not be shocked (shocked!) to find that
business is going on. Perhaps critics are mean to deny Microsoft the opportunity to sell
computers to every American schoolchild; maybe Pearson should be able to target schools
in order to sell books like
The American Experience
; Exxon-Mobil and Hewlett Packard
may deserve a little product placement. And why begrudge Chicago firms taxpayer money
for materials? Some observers find this more than the appearance of malfeasance, but
greed is the least of the problems.
Advocates of CCSSI have established a system to produce and market standards,
curriculum materials, and textbooks. With the cooperation of federal agencies and
corporate sponsors they think they have forced states to comply. The last piece of the
system is the data collection. Remember Bill Gates’ comments in 2009 to legislators:
Common standards define what the students need to learn; robust data systems tell
us whether they’re learning it — and they tell us a whole lot more than that … The
stimulus package contains funding for longitudinal data systems; I hope you will use
this funding to support systems that track student performance from early childhood
education through high school and college and into the workplace … All states and
districts should collect common data on teachers and students. We need to define the
data in a standardized way, we need to collect all of it for all of our students … Of
course, if you do build this system and get this data, you may have to deal with
people who don’t want you to use it.
Critics of the system (i.e., those people Gates wants legislators to “deal with”) are
dismissed as hysterics, but Gates’ own words tell a different story. Progressives have long
sought to track students’ beliefs and performance. This puts CCSSI advocates on a collision
course with parents and civil libertarians who do not trust the government to use the data
wisely. McGroarty, et al. write:
Beyond the ‘filing cabinet’ data that schools have long collected, the purveyors of

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‘transformational’ education seek access to fine-grained information about students’
deeper selves — their attitudes, values, mindsets, and dispositions. Ascertaining and
altering these non-cognitive features, the proponents believe, can improve education
outcomes and shape students into the types of citizens (and workers) the future
economy needs. (1)
It is perhaps bad luck for Gates, Coleman, and Zimba that the CCSSI should come
online at this moment when distrust of the government is so high. The recent scandal
about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) illegally using confidential taxpayer information
to punish opponents of the current administration (and then destroying evidence and lying
about it to Congress) makes people nervous about the government collecting data on their
children. Assurances that they just want to help are likely to fall on deaf ears. This is
especially so considering what other government agencies have written. The U.S. DOE’s
Office of Educational Technology issued a report in February 2013 titled “Promoting Grit,
Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century.” The report
focuses on how fine-grained data can be gathered from students, stored, processed, and
used. The report reads:
[M]easurement may focus on sequences of behaviors, emotions, physiological
reactions, and/or thoughts that unfold over time during learning, extracting indicators
of persistence and giving up. New technologies using educational data mining and
‘affective computing’ (the study and development of systems and devices that can
recognize, interpret, process, and simulate aspects of human affect) are beginning to
focus on ‘micro-level’ moment-by-moment data within digital and blended-learning
environments to provide feedback to adapt learning tasks. (ix)
The technical implements to do this are shown on page 44 of the report:

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The report goes on to say, “Ed Dieterle and Ash Vasudeva of the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation point out that researchers such as Jon Gabrieli and Richard Davidson are
beginning to use multiple methods to explore how specific brain activity is correlated to
other cognitive affective indicators that
are
practical to measure in school settings” (45,
italics in original). How far are these people willing to go? The authors briefly mention
ethics in a section titled, “Ethical Considerations for New Types of Personal Data”:
As new forms of measurement emerge and new types of personal data become
available, the field must also deal with critical ethical considerations. Of course,
privacy is always a concern, especially when leveraging data available in the ‘cloud’
that users may or may not be aware is being mined. However, another emergent
concern is the consequences of using new types of personal data in new ways.
Learners and educators have the potential to get forms of feedback about their
behaviors, emotions, physiological responses, and cognitive processes that have never
been available before. Measurement developers must carefully consider the impacts of
releasing such data, sometimes of a sensitive nature, and incorporate feedback
mechanisms that are valuable, respectful, and serve to support productive mindsets.
(48)
A search of this 126-page report finds the word “ethical” is used just four times including
in the title of the above section and the table of contents. On the other hand, the report is
expansive about the data they think should be gathered on students, including their “beliefs,
attitudes, dispositions, values, and ways of perceiving oneself” (77). The desire for such

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information violates a slew of existing federal regulations including the Family Educational
Rights and Privacy Act of 1974. However, as with laws forbidding federal involvement with
K-12 curriculum, McGroarty, et al. say the administration is skirting the need for parental
approval before gathering such data as:
a student’s or parent’s political affiliations or beliefs; a student’s or his family’s
mental or psychological problems; sexual behavior or attitudes; illegal, antisocial,
self-incriminating, and demeaning behavior; critical appraisals of other individuals
with whom respondents have close family relationships; privileged relationships
(such as with lawyers, physicians, or clergy); a student’s or parent’s religious
practices, affiliations, or beliefs; or income. (27)
The National Center for Education Statistics has taken the position that parental
approval is required only for studies funded directly by the U.S. DOE, and therefore does
not apply to data collected by other entities. A private database, inBloom, funded by the
Gates Foundation, is just such an entity. Begun in 2011, inBloom was intended as a
repository of data collected on American schoolchildren to be made available to interested
parties. The definition of “interested party” is so broad as to be meaningless. This is a
continuation of corporate data mining done in the private sector, but applied to the captive
market created by CCSSI. The tactic used is to provide schools with “free” services like
email and then mine data on users. McGroarty, et al. write, “Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo
employ sophisticated algorithms to comb all data collected on individual users — emails,
web searches, web sites visited (through cookies placed on the sites) — and use the results”
(38). Even Orwell’s Thought Police were less thorough:
He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you
day and night, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their
cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human
being was thinking. (363)
Clearly the effort to correct Big Brother’s shortcomings is well under way. One shudders

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to think where we are headed. Do children have any right to privacy, or does “affective
computing” preempt it? Are there any limits on government or on how intrusive
technocrats can be? How much data is enough and will the same people control it as
controlled the IRS data?
The question remains: Is this the best we can do? Clearly it is not. The Common Core
Standards should be rejected on the merits because they fail to provide for a high-quality
liberal education for American children. They fail in all subjects examined: math, English,
and history. They do not teach critical thinking skills; they preach Critical Theory. Finally,
legal, fiscal, and human rights problems are also significant. Moving ahead with the CCSSI
would be a mistake we will long regret. What went wrong?
Part 4: The Fatal Conceit
Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the
rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men … The final stage is come
when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda
based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control …”
— C. S. Lewis 69
The architects of the CCSSI demonstrate what Hayek called the fatal conceit: the belief
common among intellectuals that civilization and human progress are the result of the
superior reasoning of special people (21). They are mistaken. Elites did not invent
civilization any more than they invented languages — the people did. Despite the
pretensions of the anointed, Utopia remains imaginary and nobody chats in Esperanto (to
name just two of their big ideas). Instead, Hayek said, people make progress by imitating
others; i.e., we learn from experience. Billions of people discovered by trial and error the
best ways to deal with the difficulties of the human condition. They made trade-offs that
improved (not perfected) their lives. Civil society is not a planned community; it emerged
from the course of human events down through the ages. People passed their wisdom from

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one generation to the next by personal example in families, and by traditions in societies.
People lived and worked in Burke’s “little platoons” (families), applying moral lessons
they learned at home to building fruitful lives in their tribes and villages. In their families,
they learned the lessons of love, faith, hope, charity, respect, loyalty, acceptance, sacrifice,
sympathy, self-control, duty, fairness, humility, sincerity, hard work, and gratitude — in
short, all the moral precepts expressed in the world’s religions or, if you prefer, Natural
Law. The moral teachings of Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism,
Christianity, Norse mythology, Greek philosophy, Roman law, and the American Indians’
Great Spirit have more in common than they have differences. All are deeply rooted in the
human experience of the family. Over time, these traditions produced civilizations that
brought order and allowed us to live together and thrive. The world’s religious traditions
are by nature tragic visions: they know life is unfair, imperfect, and limited. They know
that human nature, with all its intrinsic good and evil, has been an unchanged and
unchangeable part of the human condition for 10,000 years. Burke, Lewis, and Sowell have
described this at length. Recounting their wisdom here is a perfect example of what Hayek
meant. We seek out people who know what they are talking about and we copy them.
Civilization arose from gradual changes brought about by the collective experience of
people over thousands of years. It is a fragile and complex social edifice that we must
preserve, defend, and pass on. The true social contract is between the generations living,
those who are dead, and those yet to be born.
The anointed are impatient with the tragic vision, not least because it minimizes their
role. They believe that all problems have solutions and that the people who can solve them
are people just like themselves — special people with special insight who are smarter than
“the masses” and thus entitled to make decisions on their behalf. They are experts, and
while they may disagree on specifics, the one thing experts
do
agree on is that we need to
listen to experts. Their keen insights and moral rectitude give them the right to lead. They
are driven utopian planners, and if the
untermenschen
would just get in line and follow

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orders the world would soon be a wonderful place without hunger, poverty, unhappiness,
war, or disease. They will use any means necessary to reach their goals, believing it will be
justified once they have led us to the Promised Land where the human condition is but a
dim memory. However, forcing people to follow the vision of the anointed (be it in a hard
Communist tyranny or a softer Socialist paradise) has very different results than allowing
people free choice. The freedom to choose was/is the key difference between the old East
and West Germany, North and South Korea, and Havana and Miami — places with the
same people, but very different socio-political institutions. Human freedom should be a
self-evident and self-sufficient moral good, but it also turns out to produce more happiness
and wealth for all. To progressives this is heresy.
While the anointed are dismissive of the religions of the
hoi polloi
, the
Great Unwashed,
and the
lumpen-proletariat
, they take their own beliefs and virtue as articles of faith.
Indeed, the Church of the Anointed is every bit as dogmatic, sanctimonious, self-righteous,
and rigid as any organized religion has ever been. In their current American incarnation
the anointed feign tolerance, acceptance, and love, but they operate more like Puritans in
Birkenstocks, obsessed by “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”
(Mencken 673). Anything they have not authorized frightens them. To paraphrase Orwell,
if you want a picture of the (progressive) future, imagine an Earth Shoe stamping on a
human face — forever.
Conflict between these two groups is inevitable. Those with the tragic vision derive
transcendent joy and meaning from their family, God, and tribe. They are self-contained
and stick close to loved ones. While they strive to serve others, they treat outside demands
as distractions from the most important people in their lives. Those with the vision of the
anointed derive transcendent joy and personal satisfaction from “the politics of meaning.”
They seek to organize and improve others. When Bob and Betty Banjax from the Ministry
of Love visit their ignorant country cousins, Polly and Peter Potatohead, to tell them how to
raise their children, they are genuinely miffed when the ungrateful hicks tell them what to

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do with their Five-Year Plan. Utopia always comes down to the Party forcing people to do
things they would rather not. As long as the anointed refuse to keep their hands to
themselves there is no way around this impasse.
Common Core is doomed for the same two reasons the Soviet Empire fell. First,
centralized, top-down, one-party systems do not work. The reliance of central planning on
turgid bureaucracies kills innovation and efficiency. The systems promise everything,
deliver nothing, and blame someone else. They come to be based on wishful thinking to
fulfill leaders’ empty promises, and are fed phony data to keep leaders happy and people in
the dark. Even lifelong communists in Russia, China, and Vietnam, as well as socialists in
India, eventually came to see this. Gorbachev’s
perestroika
, Deng’s special economic zones,
Vietnam’s
Doi Moi
, and India’s ending of “The License Raj” were reactions to the essential
flaws of central planning. Decades of failure finally forced these countries to accept reality.
Gates, Coleman, and Zimba reject anything that does not conform to their vision, and the
system they are building is as impervious to facts as the Kremlin was. They do not have to
ignore feedback, but this is the path they have chosen.
The second way CCSSI is doomed is related to the first — reality cannot be wished
away. Propaganda only takes a system so far. The Ministry of Truth can make people say
that 2 + 2 = 5, and Common Core can tell kids that 3 x 4 = 11 (if they have a good reason),
but that will not make it so. The math is wrong, and vilifying opponents will not change it.
Reform math was wrong in 1989 and 2000, it is wrong today, and in 2020, it will still be
wrong. Coleman can change the SAT, the DOE can endorse cockamamie curricula, and
textbook companies can make a fortune flogging bad books. But when students take the
PISA tests they compete against students who know that 2 + 2 ≠ 5, and that 3 x 4 ≠ 11. The
CCMS are not benchmarked to international standards; more to the point, nations whose
students are already high achievers on the PISA are not benchmarking their curricula to
American education fads. The rest of the world is not going to follow the U.S. into
progressively worse classrooms.

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The cultural issues are not as clear-cut as math, but they are just as important. In all of
history there has never been a successful civilization, tribe, religion, school, Girl Scout
Troop, boys’ choir, or bowling league that claimed to be humdrum and just like every other
group. Indeed, the very idea of success implies excellence, self-respect, and effort. Teaching
the common core of a culture requires that the teacher believes the culture is worth
teaching, that there is a generally accepted cultural history, and that cultural artifacts are
made available to students. It is rooted in gratitude to our ancestors, to whom we owe our
existence. Common Core is based on liberation pedagogy: it finds American history to be
racist, sexist, and imperialist; it rejects American exceptionalism; and it disapproves of
what were once considered the cornerstones of limited government such as the
Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and various religious texts. Supporters of
CCSSI parrot the progressive line about diversity. Like Mao, they say, “Let a hundred
flowers bloom.” And also like Mao the true purpose of their cultural revolution is to promote
chaos and destroy relationships within the existing society. It is uncommonly bad.
Education is not like marketing computers or selling politicians. Calling something new
and improved, asserting that lessons will produce college- and career-ready students,
saying that the Common Core is 21st-century magic or world-class pixie dust does not make
it true. Most parents help their children with homework, and no amount of PR is going to
convince them that what they see nightly at the kitchen table is something that it is not.
Parents are sensitive to their children, even if the architects of the Core are clueless. What
may have looked great on paper looks different in real life. Gates, Coleman, and Zimba are
not evil they are just guilty of hubristic pride. Convinced of their moral superiority, and
weakened by calling critics names instead of engaging them, they have cut themselves off
from input that would have at least made their plans more feasible. Now they don’t know
how to get out of this mess. Bet on calls for more money and power, but all the money and
power in the world can’t change reality.

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Works Cited
“Appendix B: Test exemplars and sample performance tasks. Common Core State
Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and
Technical Subjects.”
Common Core State Standards Initiative
(2014). Web PDF File. (16
Sept. 2014) <http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Appendix_B.pdf>
Bauerlein, Mark and Sandra Stotsky. “How Common Core’s ELA Standards place college
readiness at risk.”
Pioneer Institute
(September 2012). Web PDF file. White Paper No. 89.
Accessed 13 Sept. 2014 <http://pioneerinstitute.org/download/
how-common-cores-ela-standards-place-college-readiness-at-risk/>
Bennetta, William. “Senate denounces ‘history standards’; federal standards effort appears
dead.”
The Textbook League
(Jan.-Feb. 1995): n. pag. Web. Accessed 14 Sept. 2014
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