National Review: Common Core Rebellion Gaining Steam

Good piece at NRO from Lance T. Izumi, senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute, on the Common Core rebellion:

When federal and state-government elites quietly combined to enact the Common Core national education standards, they thought that the train had left the station and that this radical reordering of American public education was an over-and-done deal. They thought wrong. Parents and teachers from across the political spectrum are joining together in a nationwide grassroots rebellion to protest the lack of transparency in the Common Core adoption process, the exclusion of public input, and the disempowerment of local educators and the public.

Izumi mentions the CCSS rebellion in New York and Florida, hits on the data collection revolt, notes how the rebellion is coming from people on both the right and left and concludes:

The broad-based grassroots rebellion against Common Core is ultimately not about academic rigor, costs, or job skills, as important as those issues are, but about transparency, democracy, and the ability of local people to control what goes on in their children’s classrooms — an ability the nation’s founders envisioned when they left education to states and localities through the Tenth Amendment. To the chagrin of establishment elites, the rebellion is gaining momentum and may end up toppling Common Core, which would be a victory both for the people and for the principles on which our republic was founded.

The arrogance of ramming all of these reforms through with little to no debate, using the 2008 recession as cover (a la Race to the Top), and then attacking critics of the reforms as yokels or fringers will ultimately be the undoing of this reform agenda.

Top-down imposition of education policy can work in urban districts, but it wasn't going to work across the whole country.

Scarsdale, Great Neck and Garden City and places like that were going to be the test cases for whether CCSS and the ancillary reforms associated with it were going to work.

Those communities, like many others around the state, have not been accepting of this reform agenda.

And as Izumi writes, the rebellion continues to gain momentum from both right and left.

Perhaps the reformers realized a reasoned discourse over why the country needed CCSS, Endless Testing and inBloom wasn't going to convince too many people, so that's why they went ahead with the top-down, don't blink cuz' you'll miss it imposition.

But in the end, that strategy isn't going to be successful either.