The Education Invasion. Joy Pullmann
but “by the time they vote on a position,” the resolutions “get watered down so much any objections are already accommodated.” Moreover, NGA has no legal power to commit states to anything without the explicit consent of their legislatures. Yet it obviously has de facto power to influence states, as we’ll see.
NGA’s counterpart for state superintendents is CCSSO, which makes money partly by charging states to participate in a variety of committees. Membership in each committee costs $16,000 per year per state, and states can participate in several. Indiana, for example, participated in the math and social studies committees in 2012, said Adam Baker, spokesman for the Indiana Department of Education. CCSSO reported $2.5 million in revenue from membership dues in 2014.63
CCSSO also receives millions from the federal government. “Approximately 13% and 33% of the Council’s revenue and 25% and 34% of accounts receivable were provided by U.S. Department of Education grants or contracts for fiscal years 2011 and 2010, respectively,” according to the nonprofit’s 2010–11 financial statement.64 In 2011, CCSSO received $558,000 from the 2009 stimulus bill for working with one of the two federally funded networks that created national Common Core tests. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education granted those two networks $330 million in stimulus funds. Since Common Core and its tests were released, federal funding as a percentage of CCSSO’s revenue has declined to single digits, but the organization still received $1.8 million in federal dollars in 2014.65
Heather Crossin heard that CCSSO would be meeting in her hometown of Indianapolis in October 2012 to discuss national social studies mandates as a follow-up to Common Core. She called Michele Parks, a CCSSO meeting planner, and asked if she could attend. Crossin wanted to know what state officials were planning to do to her children with her money. Parks told her she could not attend the meeting. Crossin asked who was on the writing team for the social studies standards, and was told the information “was not available for public release.”
According to the organization’s meeting webpage, “the Council of Chief State School Officers holds over one hundred meetings per year. CCSSO meetings are closed to the public and attendance is by invitation only unless otherwise denoted” (emphasis in the original).66
Over a period of ten weeks, I sent dozens of emails and made numerous phone calls to at least six CCSSO spokesmen and personnel asking for access to the Indianapolis meeting or any others. At last, I got an email from Kate Dando in December 2012, long after the meeting had passed, saying: “our meetings/sessions at our meetings are open to press really on a case by case basis,” and adding that a few reporters have attended CCSSO meetings, usually on background, which means they cannot directly quote what they hear.
Why not? “It’s going to be reported that X state said this about their progress,” said Carrie Heath Phillips, CCSSO’s Common Core director. “When they have those conversations, we keep that protected, but it depends on the meeting and topic.” In other words, public officials are scared to tell the public how well they are managing public resources, and CCSSO provides them private forums to relieve that anxiety. How comforting — for everyone except parents and taxpayers.
Somehow, those two unauthoritative networking forums of governors and state superintendents became serious drivers of education policy for the nation, along with Achieve, which describes itself as “an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization.”67 This third member of the triumvirate has benefited greatly from shepherding Common Core: it received a $186 million federal grant to run one of the two national Common Core test organizations, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). There’s some job security. Achieve continues to receive public money because states contract with it for Common Core tests. Its public tax filing for 2012 shows that these tests raked in $4,830,044 for Achieve that year.68
Although we don’t know what the people who actually wrote Common Core earned for doing so, the leaders of all its parent organizations have been generously compensated. Michael Cohen had a salary of $311,602 as Achieve’s president in 2012.69 Wilhoit, the fellow who with Coleman had convinced Gates to put his money behind Common Core, made $349,615 in 2011, his last full year with CCSSO.70 Dane Linn, who directly oversaw the creation of Common Core when he worked for NGA as its education director, got a salary of $222,122 from NGA in 2010.71 These are comfortable incomes, easily outpacing the pay of most governors, and taxpayer money helped pad them.
In “Governors and the Common Core,” Linn wrote, “In my 16 years as director of NGA’s education division, I have spearheaded many national initiatives for the organization; few people have had the opportunity to influence state policy the way that I have over this time.”72 How jolly for him. But who elected Linn to “influence state policy”?
NGA has not released what resolution, if any, the governors voted on in 2009 to authorize its subsequent work to develop and promote Common Core. A researcher in Kentucky managed to get a copy of the “memorandum of agreement” that governors signed to kick off the project — not from NGA or CCSSO, but from the Kentucky Department of Education.73 Signed copies of this memorandum are nestled among the thousands of pages (often deep within unsearchable PDFs) that states submitted to the Obama administration to win education grants from funds supplied in the 2009 stimulus bill, for reasons to be explained.
States have historically created education standards in public meetings, with related documents also a matter of public record, noted Bill Allison, editorial director at the Sunlight Foundation, a public transparency watchdog. But the Common Core process was quite different. “What was behind those policies, what was considered, the different elements that went into them, the ideas that went into them — it’s a black box,” he said. “The public do have the right to know the laws that are going to affect them and their families, especially when they’re paying for them.”
Do governors have legal authority to overhaul K–12 policy in their states merely by signing a series of contracts with each other, with private organizations, and with the federal government? Does any private organization have legal authority to formulate state policy? No, and no. The only legal way to authorize “state-led” initiatives is through state legislatures, by constitutionally established processes.
With Common Core, that happened only after the fact, if it happened at all. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, in only four states did Common Core ever pass through the full state legislature. Almost everywhere else, it passed through the state board of education.74 Only seven states have elected boards of education, while four have a mix of elected and appointed members.75 So it was mostly unelected officials who locked states into an overhaul of education policy, with little to inform the public of what they were doing. But the real work of crafting the policy had been done by private organizations.
As Allison put it, “The state is outsourcing a core state function to an outside organization that is then outsourcing to other organizations, and you can’t have the parental and legislator input you normally should.” He added, “Education is the future, and I do think people have the right to know who is writing the curriculum.”
How NGA Conjured Up Common Core
The National Governors Association first brought governors directly into the project of nationalizing education standards in June 2008 when it cohosted an education forum with the Gates-funded Hunt Institute,76 a project of the former North Carolina governor James Hunt Jr. In September that year, NGA announced it was joining with CCSSO and Achieve to “promote international benchmarking of U.S. education performance.”77 The following December, the triumvirate released the “Benchmarking for Success” report calling for national curriculum mandates and tests, and recommending “a strong state-federal partnership” to accomplish that goal.
This chronology demonstrates that Common Core’s originators requested federal backing before the project had a name, contrary to their later insistence that the initiative was independent of the federal government. Linn’s paper reveals that “[Obama]