Carrying Water For The Common Core

In a Wall Street Journal article that purports to cover New Jersey Governor Chris Christie taking on members of his own party over their opposition to the Common Core standards, Lisa Fleischer writes the following (emphasis added):

There is growing resistance to the standards, including from some prominent Republicans, in part because they are worried about eventually losing state control over standards, or because of academic misgivings. Opponents at times incorrectly say the standards are required by the federal government or that it will take power out of teacher’s hands.

The statement "opponents at times incorrectly say the standards are required by the federal government" is a disingenuous one because it relies on reductionism and semantics to make opponents of the Core seem out of touch or dishonest in their opposition.

While it is true that the federal government did not mandate the Common Core standards and did not force states to adopt them, the Obama administration has used both the Race to the Top stimulus money as a carrot and the NCLB waivers as a stick to compel states to adopt the Core.

States were not forced to accept the RttT money offered by the feds, of course, but by tying the stimulus money to adopting the Core, the feds made CCSS adoption very, very attractive to lots of cash-starved states during the recession.

In the case of the NCLB waivers, as more and more states saw the majority of their schools come up against the unreachable NCLB mandates and be declared "failing schools," they were forced to seek out mandate "relief" from the USDOE in the form of NCLB waivers.

Rather controversially ( since, as Rick Hess has pointed out, the Secretary of Education doesn't actually have this kind of power), Arne Duncan required states to adopt Common Core or some other college and career-ready standards, as well as teacher evaluations tied to tests tied to the standards, in order to receive a waiver from the NCLB mandates.

Here is the language Duncan used to explain what states would be required to do in order to receive a waiver:

 "States must adopt and have a plan to implement college and career-ready standards. They must also create comprehensive systems of teacher and principal development, evaluation and support that include factors beyond test scores, such as principal observation, peer review, student work, or parent and student feedback...they must set new performance targets for improving student achievement and closing achievement gaps. They also must have accountability systems that recognize and reward high-performing schools and those that are making significant gains."

Fleischer isn't exactly wrong to say states weren't forced to adopt Common Core by the feds, but she fails to give the whole context and show how the feds have made it very, very likely that states would have to adopt the standards if they wanted either stimulus money or relief from the onerous NCLB mandates.


In addition, the statement that "opponents at times incorrectly say the standards...will take power out of teacher’s hands" is also disingenuous at best, water-carrying at worse.

While it is true that the feds do not mandate what teachers cover in their classrooms, by compelling states to adopt the Common Core standards, by mandating states to give "assessments" tied to those standards, and by issuing the requirement that teachers be evaluated using test scores from tests tied to the standards in order to receive a NCLB waiver, the feds are, in effect, taking power from teachers (and local school districts and even states, for that matter) and enforcing a one-size fits all curricula and teaching method all across the land.

In short, the feds are forcing teachers to emphasize in their daily lessons whatever is being tested on these Common Core "assessments" because their evaluations and jobs are directly tied to the scores from these "assessments."

In a very real way, that is diminishing the power of teachers in individual classrooms with mandates made from afar.

To write that it is incorrect for opponents to say that Common Core will take power away from teachers again fails to give the entire complexity and context of the issue and winds up misleading readers into thinking that those wacky Common Core opponents are off the wall once again.

The Wall Street Journal is owned by the Common Core-promoting/for profit education technology company-owning Rupert Murdoch, though I can't imagine Lisa Fleischer would ever allow the bottom line of the company she works for to color how she writes her articles.

Still, when you notice some of the statements Fleischer makes here independent of anything Christie says about the Common Core, you have to wonder if she's carrying water for the Common Core as much as Christie is.