Common Core is fundamentally a conservative idea.
After governors, local education officials and teachers agreed on a curriculum, the Obama administration offered money to states that could demonstrate they met federal benchmark standards. This "made a voluntary agreement among states look like a top-down directive from the federal government."
This overreach, though, "does not change a basic truth: Common, voluntary standards are a good, conservative policy," writes
William Bennett in The Wall Street Journal.
Critics of Common Core have been misled into thinking there is a federal required reading list. There isn't — unless you count the Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address," he writes.
Bennett, who served as Ronald Reagan's secretary of education between 1985-88, writes that no one will lay down what is taught in local classrooms or how. It is self-evident that youngsters have to be able to "read and distill complex sentences," that they ought to be familiar, for instance, with the Bible and Shakespeare by the time they graduate high school. Likewise, it's self-evident they should know arithmetic including fractions, decimals, and percentages.
Even if the Common Core "process was contaminated by politics" and by the "unwelcome and unhelpful" intrusion of the administration, the fact remains that such voluntary standards make good conservative sense, writes Bennett.
It doesn't matter what you call these standards, so long as they are comparable from state to state, much like the NAEP, AP, SAT and ACT are used throughout the country. The goal is to have states take charge and to build on the Common Core based on standards set at the local district level, he writes.
"The principles behind the Common Core affirm a great intellectual tradition and inheritance. We should not allow them to be hijacked by the federal government or misguided bureaucrats and politicos," Bennett concludes.
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