Is the Tea Party Right About the Common Core? By Anthony Cody

Yesterday's Washington Post carried a banner story about growing Tea Party opposition to the Common Core. We learn that across the country, Tea Party activists have been organizing around opposition to the Common Core, and have succeeded in blocking or delaying the standards in at least nine states.

There has been a contemptuous reaction from the highest levels of our educational system. Arne Duncan has implied that opponents are tin-foil hatted paranoids: "It's not a black helicopter ploy and we're not trying to get inside people's minds and brains," he said last week. A week before he responded to questions at Capital Hill, saying "Let's not get caught up in hysteria and drama." And of course corporate-funded conservatives like Jeb Bush, and the Fordham Institute are still on board all the way.

The problem they have is that the substance of the Tea Party criticism of Common Core standards is solid. And it aligns pretty well with what many of us a bit more to the left have been saying for years. Let's take the arguments, as presented by this Washington Post article and elsewhere, and check them out.

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Comment by Katie Zahedi on June 5, 2013 at 11:56am: No matter who makes a criticism of the heavy-handed, political domination of education reform, the concerns should be heard and evaluated. Indeed, it should be a concern to all parents (conservative or liberal) when dictates are imposed on public education by politicians and their apointees to leadership in education who often have very little experience in public schools. The public schools serve all children and creating success in a private or charter school setting, while laudable, amounts to creating success in a controlled environment. If, as a nation, we are serious about improving U.S. public education and if we are prepared to make it a genuine priority, then our secretary of education and all state commissioners should have at least ten years in the public school classroom and ten years as a principal in public school. The expedited certification of hand-picked individuals to lead the state and federal levels of school reform, who are beholden to their political sponsors, is a recipe for failure. This is the case because inexperienced leaders make decisions that are not grounded in a good understanding of the conditions that their policies will influence and they also lack the wisdom that comes with experience. There are plenty of committed and qualified individuals working in schools that should serve as the pool for selecting leadership

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Is the Tea Party Right About the Common Core? By Anthony Cody

Is the Tea Party Right About the Common Core?

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