Many people who argue against the new educational standards called the Common Core like to stand on the side of condemning corporations for their involvement and making money off of the backs of children. While I am a capitalist and have no problem with corporations making money, I do take a turn on this issue and dislike the fact that big business is making money off of our kids.
I also happen to be an equal opportunity blamer. I blame the corporations and the government. It’s the corporations and the government, working hand in hand, to take over the educational system of America. The government is made up of people, who in their weakness, see the power of big money and allow themselves to basically be bought off by the corporations.
Shame on the politicians who can be bought off and do not stand on principle and shame on the corporations for the blatant greed when it comes to our children.
This corporate cronyism is astounding and galling to a believer in free market. I read once about the economic theory called mercantilism. The private/public partnerships the federal government and big business are creating remind me of a sort of modern day mercantilism.
Common Core backers like to say that we people who don’t support the initiative are conspiracy theorists and that the federal government didn’t have a thing to do with it. The feds came in at the last minute and decided to kick in 4.35 billion dollars into the mix with the Race to the Top funds basically coercing states to jump on accepting the Core so they could possibly win some money.
Neil McCluskey of the CATO institute writes:
Andy Smarick at the Core-supporting Thomas B. Fordham Institute lamented that the write-up for President Obama’s education budget proposal gives the administration credit for widespread Core adoption. Wrote Smarick: “The anti-Common Core forces will likely use this language as evidence that Common Core was federally driven.” Of course it was federally driven, by Race to the Top (RTTT) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers! But the budget proposal tells us far more than that.
And now, in a very obvious showing to the folks who dare to stand against the Core, we see that President Obama is as culpable for this disaster as we always figured. Obama wants to attach annual federal funding to the continued use of the Common Core.
McCluskey points out that: In fact, President Obama proposes changing Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act – of which NCLB is just the most recent reauthorization – to a program called “College- and Career-Ready Students,” with an annual appropriation of over $14 billion.
In watching the debacle of the president’s signature law, Obamacare, I was actually a little surprised that they recently changed parts of the law to not take effect until after 2016…a move that was nothing but political. It was obvious and pathetic! So I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that this administration was tying the hands of all public schools across the country by dangling an even larger carrot then the initial 4.35 billion dollars that states fell over themselves to get to. And in the middle of a huge pushback on the standards, no less.
Is this why states are so hell bent on keeping the Core, even as parents and teachers boycott tests and protest political offices across the nation? Perhaps they knew that there was a bigger pay off if they stuck around.
McCluskey’s final statement on the matter perfectly sums it up:
While it’s a crucial fact, the full story on the Common Core isn’t that the feds coerced adoption. It is that the end game is almost certainly complete federal control by connecting national standards and tests to annual federal funding. And that, it is now quite clear, is no conspiracy theory.
