"Common Core" or Common Mistake?

Columnist George Will recently published an opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled:

Doubts over Common Core

Dr. Will, a Princeton-educated political scientist, makes several excellent points. Among them the following:

"The Common Core represents the ideas of several national organizations (of governors and school officials) about what and how children should learn. It is the thin end of an enormous wedge. It is designed to advance in primary and secondary education the general progressive agenda of centralization and uniformity."

This is correct. Just like "Race to the Top", "No Child Left Behind" and many other public education initiatives with many other catchy names, Common Core still represents an ongoing attempt to centralize the conduct and management of public education in the United States. It really doesn't matter whence the educational ideas in Common Core originate, they are still embraced, encouraged, and facilitated at the federal level, through the ill-named U.S. Department of Education. In his July 2013 remarks before the American Society of News Editors, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said:

"I'd like to make the case that (Common Core) standards have the capacity to change education in the best of ways—setting loose the creativity and innovation of educators at the local level, raising the bar for students, strengthening our economy and building a clearer path to the middle class."

When the President's Education Czar makes such comments about the latest fad in public education, it is pretty clear that his administration is willing to do almost anything to support it. In fact, the administration strongly encourages State and local cooperation with Common Core.

As Dr. Will also points out:

"The Obama administration has purchased states’ obedience by partially conditioning waivers from onerous federal regulations (from No Child Left Behind) and receipt of federal largess ($4.35 billion in Race to the Top money from the 2009 stimulus) on the states’ embrace of the Common Core."

In other words, despite its not having been a typical edict from on high from Washington, D.C., the Obama Administration strongly influences and encourages the adoption of Common Core in an equally powerful way...through funding and, perhaps more importantly, withholding funding from states that want no part of it.

Education Funding

But where does the administration's education funding come from in the first place? It has no money of its own. It only has the funds Congress budgets for it. So where does Congress get the money it budgets for the Executive Branch? It comes largely from the states (through federal taxpayers) and the rest comes from borrowing, which further increases our national debt.

This is the tragic "joke" that so many people fail to recognize or appreciate. The People cede taxes to the federal government which, in turn, launders and skims its percentage off the top, before using the remainder to create and mandate or encourage government-centric programs like Common Core.

Why? Why do the states persist in sending so much of their money to Washington, D.C. only to be skimmed and laundered before it is sent back to them to support this or that education program or initiative? Why do the states not simply keep more of their funds within their own borders to begin with, cut out the federal middle man (money launderer), and use them as they see fit? If a state likes an educational program like Common Core, all it needs do is adopt, fund, and manage it itself. It doesn't need Washington to somehow give it permission or financial inducements to do so.

According to a document posted on the U.S. Department of Education's website:

"The Administration is requesting $71.2 billion in discretionary appropriations for the Department of Education in fiscal year 2014, an increase of $3.1 billion, or 4.5 percent, over the fiscal year 2012 level."

In what sane Constitutional Republic do we need an 85-page document that seeks to justify $71.2 billion in public funds for a federal department that should not even exist in the first place? Without the federal money launderer, and divided equally, that would be an additional $1.4 billion in education funding *per state*.

A Better Way

If we are truly serious about improving public education throughout the United States, one of the very first things we should do is defund and disband the federal Department of Education, which has no legitimate Constitutional basis on which to exist. All of the funding that we currently waste on that federal department should be retained by the states and the localities, to use as they choose, and not as some distant monolithic federal department dictates.

A next step could be for each state to enact reasonable school choice initiatives, so that parents can afford to exert better control over the quality of their own child's education.

A next step could be to limit the enormous political influence of Teachers Unions, which often restricts the ability of School Districts to remove inept teachers from the classroom and routinely inhibits the passage of reasonable school choice initiatives.

There are a number of other reasonable steps we could take to improve public education in the United States and none of them involve the federal government.



John B. Greet is a Long Beach native and retired LBPD Sergeant who currently lives in the Pacific Northwest.