“We don’t need no education,
We don’t need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom,
Teachers, leave them kids alone.
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall…”
Pink Floyd
It may be true that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but it is equally true that it’s architects are those with evil designs. The intentions of the Common Core standards might seem innocent enough on the surface, such as holding schools to be more responsible to adequately teach our children, aligning standards from state to state so that children who move won’t be “left behind”, and objectively measuring the progress schools, teachers, and students are making across the country; but “by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes”!
“Wrong, do it again!”
Wrong, do it again!”
The initiative began with governors and business leaders, and states started the process of adapting to the new standards. All well and good, just another in a long list of experiments to try to reinvent the wheel we call education, albeit in a more obtuse, less effective, and politically correct format. In 2009 though, the Obama administration decided the process was not moving quickly enough, and moved to turn the deliberative process into a race. The Education Department under Secretary Arne Duncan created “Race to the Top”, a $3.4 billion grant competition. In the all too common way that the Federal government infuses it’s influence into matters it has no Constitutional business being involved with, it created a carrot that it could use as an incentive to entice the states and localities to cooperate with it’s objectives. No one seems to take notice that the carrots are created from monies extracted from the states and the citizens. And so the Feds used our own money to create a 3.4 billion dollar carrot. A carrot of that size can easily be used as a club, and the enticement becomes coercion in a deal we can’t easily refuse.
In a typically American response though, parents across the country did refuse. In this nation where freedom is assumed to include the right of refusal, students are opting out of the Common Core exams in significant numbers. In one local school district the numbers are up to 60% of the students refusing to take the exams. It is a peculiar part of our American experience that we the people occasionally assert our authority without waiting for the mills of the gods in Washington to grind out the legislation. This is especially true when the welfare of our children is at stake.
“If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding!
How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”
You might suppose that with such resistance the process is doomed to be rejected, or at least revised, but the reasons for the feds being involved in the first place don’t simply vanish because common citizens are disenchanted with the outcomes, we still have Obamacare don’t we? The vermin of governmental overreach, once entrenched, is a hard one to exterminate. Education Secretary Duncan is not going gentle into that good night, but instead has apparently chosen to double down and rage against the dying of what he thinks to be light. On Tuesday Duncan declared that the Federal government is obligated to intervene if states fail to address the boycotts. Now, I’m pretty sure that the Department of Education is one of the few Federal agencies that doesn’t have it’s own SWAT team, so I’m assuming that Duncan anticipates using his 3.4 billion dollar carrot for a club, and beating the dissenters into submission. When you dance with the Devil, he likes to lead.
IMHO: While it might seem that the idea of holding all schools to minimum standards for the education of our children was a perfectly reasonable notion, investing that kind of influence in one central entity results in an inevitable expression of absolute power, followed as always by absolute corruption, and absolute incompetence. The fact that the Feds need to incentivize the program indicates that this is something the states weren’t entirely prepared to do. If Duncan is able to use his carrot to coerce our schools to do what we believe to be counterproductive to our children’s education, then we will have become the government’s whores, and we will have sold our children into our prostitution.
Ultimately, while the initiative was conceived to hold education across the country to common standards, it has been coopted by those whose intention it always seems to be is to make us all think the same things in the same way… to make our children common. And therein is the cause of the rebellion. We are at our heart a nation that embraces diversity. We love our regional differences; lobster in Maine, bagels in New York, gumbo in Louisiana, pizza in Chicago, cheesesteaks in Philly…. Common Core is the McDonalds of education! It’s the same no matter where you go, but is that really always a good thing when it comes to food or education? There’s nothing wrong with minimum standards, but when every outcome has to meet some bureaucratic idea of what your child should be learning, and how she should be learning it, then we are following a recipe designed to keep us the same; and sameness invariably leads to blandness, uniformity, and vanishing creativity. We are repulsed by the prioritization of conformity, because in America we do not want our child to be one in an endless line of worker bees, just another brick in the wall. We recoil at such a notion, and we rebel, because at our core, America is anything but common.
