March 2014 – Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have already adopted the new education standards referred to as “Common Core,” but in many ways, average folks living in those states are just now starting to hear about it.

So what is Common Core? According to Common Core State Standards Initiative, the official website dedicated to promoting the new approach, the definition sounds innocuous.

CCSSI is “a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt. The standards are designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter credit bearing entry courses in two or four year college programs or enter the workforce.”

So what’s wrong with that? Nothing, if you speak to proponents. Most Americans have a sense that public education, home to America’s more than 49.5 million public school students, is broken in many communities. The idea that we should improve standards – and even make those standards uniform across the country – sounds like a good one.

A federal takeover?
Critics of Common Core, however, unload with both barrels, pointing to problems like the exorbitant state costs of implementation, untested standards that essentially make our kids guinea pigs, and the threat of massive amounts of student data flowing out of the classrooms of America into the clutches of government bureaucrats who are, many believe, up to no good.

Within the conservative community, however, there is one overarching criticism: The Common Core State Standards represent the federalizing of public education in the U.S.

According to the Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts-based think tank that opposes Common Core, at least three federal laws prohibit a Washington, D.C., takeover of education.

Those laws prohibit the U.S. Department of Education “from directing, supervising or controlling any nationalized standards, testing or curriculum,” according to Jim Stergios, executive director of Pioneer Institute, and Jamie Gass, director of the group’s Center for School Reform.

This is why the No Child Left Behind education law signed by President George Bush in 2001 required states to establish assessments for all students. Each state developed its own tests independently of Washington in order to receive federal monies.

Common Core is the first ever nationalized set of standards in U.S. history. Thus, the questions of who developed them and whether or not it is a federal effort are extremely important.

Development of the standards 
Like a lot of things in the world of politics nowadays, the answers are not crystal clear.

Who developed Common Core? Well, not the federal government per se, but critics nevertheless complain that the standards were created by Washington elitists – private and politically unaccountable organizations that had no public input.

Common Core was built through a “secretive process” by Washington, D.C., insiders, said Marion Brady, a veteran teacher, curriculum designer and author of What’s Worth Learning? and Toward A Coherent Curriculum.

“Variously motivated corporate interests, arguing that the core [subjects in schools were] being sloppily taught, organized a behind-the-scenes campaign to super-standardize it. They named their handiwork the Common Core State Standards to hide the fact that it was driven by policymakers in Washington D.C.,” Brady said. “This was done with insufficient public dialogue or feedback from experienced educators, no research, no pilot or experimental programs ….”

Follow the money
Federal fingerprints became more obvious when states were convinced to adopt the national standards.

According to Stergios and Gass, in 2009, when newly-elected President Barack Obama launched his “Race to the Top” initiative, more than $4 billion in federal grant money was offered to states to replicate policies that improved student performance.

“That quickly changed and the federal money was instead used to persuade states to adopt administration-backed nationalized K-12 English and math standards and tests known as Common Core,” they said.

Other incentives were added to sweeten the deal, but the bottom line was this: Cash was offered if the states switched over to nationalized standards.

“By using their adoption as a condition for states to receive grants … the U.S. Department of Education has accelerated the implementation of [Common Core],” explained Robert S. Eitel and Kent D. Talbert, former counsels general to the DOE.

Coercion soon followed. The states were not allowed to wait to see what the Common Core standards even looked like – they had to sign on quickly or forfeit their opportunity for the cash. Likewise, states were not allowed time to present the idea to constituents.

Moreover, like the irresistible gravitational pull of a black hole, it seems clear that, while Common Core started out merely as education standards, the intent was always to eventually subsume curriculum and testing as well. That’s a bold claim, but it was first made, not by a critic, but by a major sponsor of the initiative: Microsoft founder Bill Gates. 

According to Schools Matter, in July 2009, Bill Gates addressed the National Conference of State Legislators in support of Common Core. He said: “[I]dentifying common standards is not enough. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when the curriculum and the tests are aligned to these standards.”

Who could expect anything different? How would states know that students were learning what is required by the standards except via tests? And in order to make sure kids passed the tests, curricula would be developed to make sure students were taught what was in the assessments.

Thus it was no surprise when Eitel and Talbert revealed that federal monies were already being used to develop curriculum materials and tests aligned to Common Core.

“The result is a de facto national curriculum and instructional materials effectively supervised, directed, or controlled by the USDOE,” they said.

The consequences of that takeover will be felt outside the public school system, influencing homeschooling parents and private schools too. While they will still be able to set their own standards – at least for now – college entrance exams such as the ACT and SAT are already being altered to reflect the nationalized standards. It is quite conceivable that any student taught outside the Common Core universe will be regarded as a second class citizen when applying to college, simply because his test scores might be inferior. The pressure to conform will be enormous.

Ruled by bureaucrats
Even though it was the states that adopted Common Core, it does not seem unfair to characterize this as a federal takeover of education. The states did not initiate the process of nationalizing standards, but they were bribed and coerced into doing so by the federal government.

And if states did not initiate this process, then who did? Who decided that education should be uniform in the first place? And who gets to decide what that uniformity will look like? Who will decide whether states are uniformly instructing their students?

It will be the education bureaucrats in the federal government, not parents or the local and state educators representing them.