Three years ago, then-Gov. Sonny Perdue stood at Peachtree Ridge High School in Suwanee as he presided over the release of national educational standards in math and English. As a member of the National Governors Association, Perdue had helped drive creation of the so-called Common Core initiative, and he was clearly proud.
“We have thrown our teachers into classrooms and said, ‘Teach!’” Perdue told a closed-circuit national audience. “But we have been unwilling up until now to articulate exactly what it is that we expect young people to know at different levels. And that was why it was important for states to come together, as a coalition of states, through the National Governors Association, to say this is important and we need to identify those expectations.”
The Common Core standards, now in place in Georgia and 44 other states, grew out of a largely conservative assertion that educational standards across the nation were too low, and that teachers, students, school systems and states had to be held accountable. “I’m a conservative, but this is a national imperative,” as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush put it. “We have close to no standards.” Conservative governors such Indiana’s Mitch Daniels and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal joined Perdue and Bush as champions of the program.
Now it’s threatening to come undone. Right-wing paranoia profiteers such as Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin have targeted Common Core as some sort of secret conspiracy against the youth of America, and it’s having an effect. Last month, the Republican National Committee voted unanimously to condemn Common Core as “an inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children so they will conform to a preconceived ‘“normal’.” In Indiana, the Republican Legislature has approved a bill halting implementation of the standards, and other states may follow suit.
Here in Georgia, legislation has already been introduced banning Common Core. In Cobb County, conservative opposition has forced the local school board to at least delay purchase of math textbooks linked to the Common Core. And state Sen. Lindsey Tippins of Cobb, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, says he distrusts the standards and will consider legislation to secede from the program.
Opposition takes two basic forms. The first argues that the Common Core standards are flawed, and that implementation will be difficult. There’s undoubtedly some truth to those criticisms. No matter how good the standards are, only the foolish would believe that they won’t have to be adjusted as we gain experience. In some states — and Georgia may be among them — the transition may prove difficult.
However, none of that means that the effort to create national benchmarks is not worth making, or that the current standards don’t represent a good start.
The second form of opposition sees something sinister in any form of national standard, regardless of its contents or source. It is telling, for example, that opponents of the Common Core have begun to describe it as “ObamaCore,” even though the Obama administration had nothing to do with its creation. Instead, the Barack Obama administration made the apparent mistake of embracing and helping to finance a good idea that had bubbled up from among governors and state school superintendents, just as conservative theory holds that it should.
What happens next poses an interesting test case. In recent months, Republican leaders have rejected charges that the party has been hijacked by ideological extremists unable and unwilling to govern. As a counter, they have cited the example of GOP governors, many of whom have governed successfully and pragmatically. So what happens when a valid policy initiative bubbling up from those governors runs afoul of those in the party base who get a thrill out of seeing every government initiative as a threat?
Michael Petrelli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, fears the worst. The RNC’s condemnation of the Common Core, he writes, “will bestow a degree of legitimacy upon the anti-standards coalition and put pressure on Republican governors and legislators to fall in line. Which is something approaching tragedy … To cede this ground to Democrats is an enormous policy and political mistake.”
