The final problem is that Bush has taken policy stances against his party’s grass roots on the hot button issues of immigration and education. Bush is an advocate for pathways to citizenship and residency for illegal immigrants, positions that House Republican leaders didn’t even want to debate in this election year for fear they would cause too big a rift in the ranks. Bush is also an advocate for Common Core education standards, which advocates like Bill Gates say are designed to make the United States more competitive in the world. Grass-roots conservatives are passionately opposed to the standards, arguing that they remove local control of education and dumb down teaching of crucial subjects like math. In Indiana, activists have just convinced GOP Gov. Mike Pence to withdraw the state from Common Core.
Notice how the CCSS are characterized in the Dickerson piece - standards which "advocates like Bill Gates say are designed to make the United States more competitive in the world."
Opponents, on the other hand, "are passionately opposed to the standards, arguing that they remove local control of education and dumb down teaching of crucial subjects like math."
Remember when mainstream media journalists like John Dickerson used to copy and paste the boilerplate description of the Common Core State (sic) Standards from proponents like Corestandards.org?
The Common Core is a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA). These learning goals outline what a student should know and be able to do at the end of each grade. The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live.
Not anymore - now we're getting this into the description:
Grass-roots conservatives are passionately opposed to the standards, arguing that they remove local control of education and dumb down teaching of crucial subjects like math.
No wonder Common Core proponents are getting so shrill in their attacks against CCSS critics and opponents.
When even mainstream media figures like Dickerson frame the CCSS as something that advocates "say" will make the U.S. more competitive but opponents "argue" that the standards are dumbing down America and handing over control of the nation's schools to the feds, you know they have lost control of their message.
And as any student of politics can tell you, it isn't long after you lose control of the message that you lose the war.
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