The Education Invasion. Joy Pullmann
understand the content of the new standards.”111 Its grant application promised it would provide teachers with “exemplary instructional materials linked to CCSS [Common Core State Standards]”112 and with “model curriculum and instructional modules that are aligned with the CCSS,” as well as training.113 It would send teachers “recommended readings, focused group discussions, use of online tools, and sharing of annotated examples of best practices and exercises.”114 The organization budgeted $5.125 million in federal funds to contract with yet another organization to develop such “instructional and curriculum resources for educators.”115
PARCC’s federal contract said it would distribute sample test items that “model the kinds of activities and assignments that teachers should incorporate into their classrooms throughout the year.”116 The contract included plans for PARCC to create an online resource with curriculum frameworks for teachers to use in lesson planning.117 PARCC would also write “model curriculum frameworks” and “exemplar lesson plans.”118 In 2015, Joanne Weiss wrote that “new curriculum materials funded through Race to the Top and released in 2014 are already in use in 20 percent of classrooms nationwide.”119
Recall that Achieve, the nonprofit that coordinated the writing of Common Core, runs PARCC and should thus be well aware of this federal oversight and involvement. Yet the organization routinely proclaims independence from the feds. For example, when Michigan’s legislature was rethinking its commitment to Common Core in 2013, Achieve’s president, Michael Cohen, testified to the state house of representatives that the vision of Common Core was for “no federal participation in the process at all — no federal funding, no federal review or involvement.”120 At that very time, Cohen was leading a Common Core testing organization that submitted to monthly oversight calls with federal officials and was using federal funds to write national curriculum materials and tests. That same organization had helped coordinate memorandums of agreement in which signatories asked for federal assistance to launch the Common Core project.
Remember, too, that it’s flat-out illegal for the federal government to have anything to do with curriculum. Federal agencies have historically avoided the explicit legal prohibition by paying other people to write curriculum. So the feds aren’t doing it themselves, but these projects are definitely carried out under federal auspices and authority; they rely on federal funds; and their shape is influenced by federal officials. They are federal products in all but name, though Common Core supporters have clutched at technicalities to cover their rears.
The U.S. Constitution grants the federal government no power whatsoever in education policy. It’s legally a state and local responsibility. Full stop. But that changed in practice after a Supreme Court decision of 1937. In Helvering v. Davis, the Court reinterpreted the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause in a way that “allows Congress to use money to induce states to adopt policies the federal government could itself not impose,” explained James L. Buckley, a retired U.S. senator and federal judge. “The federal government cannot force states to do things, but it can bribe them to do things.” His book Saving Congress from Itself jumps off from research showing that one-sixth of the federal budget is consumed by grants to states, private organizations, and local governments to fund activities that technically fall outside the federal government’s constitutional limits.121
Running that money through the federal bureaucracy before it filters down again through local organizations to the American people is a way to increase the cost of any enterprise. It also diminishes the accountability of public officials and programs, Buckley pointed out, because it’s hard to hold local officials accountable for the failure of a federal program. They didn’t think it up, they just went along to keep their jobs or to get back some of the money their constituents were obliged to send to the federal government. “The public at large has got to become aware of how much this affects them” not just in their pocketbooks, said Buckley, but also in terms of “the democratic ability to determine what’s going to happen in their back yard and how their money is going to be used.”
Passing Common Core to Find Out What’s In It
Remember that forty states and the District of Columbia signed RTT contracts with the Obama administration in 2010 promising to use Common Core before even a draft of it was available.122 This helps explain why almost nobody had heard of Common Core until well after it was etched in stone. Even education reporters said little about Common Core until parents began complaining about what was happening in their children’s classrooms.
A search of “Common Core standards” in all English-language newspapers in the LexisNexis search engine brings up 371 stories in 2010.123 That’s an average of seven news stories per state for the whole year, in all publications. For the year 2009, when the project was germinating, a search finds barely more than thirty stories in all.
In the nation’s dominant newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, a total of twenty-one print articles on Common Core appeared in 2009–10. Only one article in each publication during that time referenced a critic of the initiative. In the Times, it was a Chicago parent worried that national tests would lead to overtesting. In the Post, it was Neal McCluskey from the libertarian Cato Institute making one critical point alongside positive statements by three other people plus reference to a supportive study.
The Wall Street Journal’s archives do not appear on Lexis, and their own online archives don’t show results earlier than 2011, but in that year the Journal published only six stories containing those search terms. One was a supportive op-ed by Jeb Bush and Joel Klein, former New York City schools chancellor. The others were routine reports on the standards rolling out into schools, a done deal.
Once parents noticed the changes coming into their children’s schools, their outcries prompted more extensive news coverage. In 2011, a Lexis-Nexis search for the terms “Common Core standards” turned up 448 articles. The number doubled the next year, to 889. Then came a surge in 2013, with 2,273 stories — more than six times as many as in 2010, the year that Common Core effectively became national policy. In 2014, the number more than doubled over the previous year, to 4,847.
Print mentions of “Common Core” and “standards,” 2009–2014
These statistics indicate that reporters failed to keep the public informed of the extensive changes afoot in education before the signatures were inked. By the time parents had enough information to voice their opposition, their school districts were legally obligated to keep the train moving.
Frederick Hess and Michael McShane of the American Enterprise Institute published a study of news reporting on Common Core in which they found that the initiative “received hardly any attention at all” in the popular press while it was being created and adopted by most of the states.124 The media attention spiked only when the curriculum mandates were actually in the classrooms. Here’s their graph of the news coverage by month from 2009 through 2013:
Common Core referenced in articles by month, 2009–2013
Hess and McShane also compared the media coverage of Common Core with that of another controversial education policy, school vouchers, by number of stories per year in relation to the number of children affected. In 2013, the year of highest Common Core coverage they reviewed, reporters wrote one article for every four children who received a school voucher, but one for every 1,100 children whose schools had to use Common Core. That’s a difference of 27,500 percent.
They further searched for “Common Core” together with descriptive terms relating to political conflict, such as “supporter” and “opponent.” This led to “a straightforward conclusion: the coverage of the standards at the outset was generally glowing, rarely referencing any kind of conflict until it had already bubbled over.”
Despite the surge of media attention in 2013, a national PDK/Gallup survey in May