In 2007, Janet Napolitano, then the Democratic governor of Arizona and the chair of the National Governors’ Association, wrote an initiative for the year, as is custom for chairs of the NGA. Hers focused on improving the state of American education—specifically math and science—and in pursuit of this end, she convened a council of educators, experts, and informed politicians, which released a report in December 2008 acting as the foundation for what’s known as the Common Core Standards Initiative.
Part of the impetus for this project was the much maligned Bush-era ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy, which allowed states to create their own tests and standards when evaluating student performance. This earlier system was designed to preserve local autonomy in curricular matters, but it incentivized state officials to dumb down evaluations in order to inflate the perceived competence of their pupils.
The creators of Common Core hoped to fix this problem. Grade by grade, their program laid out the basic skills that students should have acquired regardless of their geographic location. This was all fairly basic stuff. A second grader should be able to compare two basic fiction narratives; a first grader should be able to add and subtract small numbers. There were no required texts, and the specifics of curricula were to be the realm of individual institutions. While developing the program, Napolitano’s council received constant guidance from local educators and politicians, and, as a result, 44 states quickly signed on to Common Core upon its introduction in 2010.
At the time, the program was neither controversial nor partisan. Among its many advocates were Governor Bobby Jindal (R) of Louisiana and Governor Mike Pence (R) of Indiana. Yet, a few months ago, the political tide shifted abruptly.
To give a bit of background, radical members of the Tea Party had opposed the program on principle for years, viewing Common Core as a severe imposition by federal and state governments on local communities—even an attempt at political indoctrination by the Obama administration, even though the program includes no specific doctrines nor curricular requirements.
Only recently, however, have these once-fringe views found active governmental representation. Republicans in several state legislatures—including those in Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, and Florida—are entertaining bills to scuttle the program, and some seem poised to succeed. Now, with the gubernatorial election season upon us, and presidential hopefuls starting to jockey for ideological position, traditional and centrist Republicans, under pressure from their right flank, have also taken up the anti-Common Core cause.
Bobby Jindal is one of them. Though, as you’ll remember, he was one of the program’s key supporters, the governor decided to reverse course this April, writing to eight state legislators in support of their efforts to withdraw from Common Core. Mike Pence is another: earlier this month, he signed a measure that formally reversed Indiana’s adoption of the standards—the only state to do so thus far. Among Common Core’s other high-level public opponents are Governor Nikki Haley (R-S.C.), whose opposition has been the most strident of all, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and dozens of lesser-known House GOPers.
Politically, the Common Core backlash is consistent: appealing to the grassroots, hard right is a boon to contenders in staunchly conservative electorates—which includes the voter base of the GOP primary. Ideologically, however, the backlash is about as inconsistent as could possibly be imagined, directly contradicting the historical views toward education of both the Tea Party and the old-school Republican establishment.
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Conservatives, to elaborate, have worked for decades to severely hem in the breadth of an American education, and to create curricular rules far more stringent than any measure within Common Core.
Take the snafu over ethic studies in the American Southwest in late 2012 and early 2013. In Arizona, state Attorney General Tom Horne—a Tea Partier from the conservative city of Phoenix supported by Tea Partiers the state over—wrote and pushed through the controversial HB 2281, which effectively banned ethic studies in public schools. The prime target of the bill was the Mexican American Studies Program in the left-leaning Tucson Unified School District. Tucson’s educators appealed in federal court unsuccessfully, but the judge did note that the application of the law was “at least suggestive of racism,” as it was applied only to the study of one ethnic group—Latinos.
Whether or not the law was constitutional or the product of racism, it did show without doubt that Tea Partiers were willing to strong-arm the curricula of communities against their will, and this bloc was passionate about doing so. Of course, this bloc would turn around in 2014 and accuse the federal government of doing exactly what it had already done—even though Common Core includes no mandatory curricular changes.
The traditional Republicans whom the Tea Partiers are pressuring have a similar, though less successful history of curricular restriction—a history that has penetrated the Harvard bubble in recent years.
Seniors may remember the short-lived debate in 2011 over a number of relatively new departments—Women and Gender Studies, African and African-American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, among them. Conservative organizations denigrated these concentrations, their opinion finding strident expression in a locally infamous column by Samuel Brennan of the Harvard Salient:
The ethnic studies movement is driven by an attempt to direct more attention to a topic that deserves no more attention than it already gets, and probably a good deal less. The necessary elements of a man’s education have not changed much over two thousand years of Western education—the Trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the scientific Quadrivium of geometry, arithmetic, music and astronomy should still be the basic foundation of education.
In other words, the ancient Athenians should decide our curricula—and the social context or the preferences of instructors, no matter their locality, simply don’t matter. Whereas conservatives would be right to implement an educational “Trivium” of humanities, liberals would be authoritarians to suggest that first graders be able to solve basic equations.
The sentiment of the above article is by no means isolated. The Intercollegiate Review—a pan-collegiate magazine published by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, of which William F. Buckley, Jr. was the first president—frequently derides these same fields, and makes the same appeals to the Athenian system. And while few people deny that ancient Greeks were intelligent, only traditional conservatives claim that the study of astronomy or music or classical politics is somehow mutually exclusive to the study of Mexican-Americans.
The above ideology, to be sure, has a hefty conservative heritage to it—one that can be traced through the history of right-leaning media: when Commentary, a journal of the right, was founded in 1945, it was actually a left-leaning magazine with the goal of assimilating America’s Jewish population to the pro-Western, liberal, contented ethos of the time; Lionel Trilling, one of the stalwart defenders of the Western intellectual tradition, was a founding editor. When the academy moved left, however, the magazine moved right, into the center of neoconservative thought—and in doing so it brought to the right the idea that no community should study anything but the intellectual tradition upon which Commentary was founded. By April of this year, the magazine went so far as to argue that ethnic studies of all kinds should be eliminated at the undergraduate level at state universities.
Today, National Review, the Weekly Standard, Human Events, the Intercollegiate Review, and all other major conservative journals have taken up an anti-ethnic-studies stance, convinced that, in terms of curricula, one vision—their vision—is solely accurate. In Arizona we’ve seen the political results of this attitude. Yet when the Obama administration supports mere guidelines—almost all of which appear relatively agreeable—these strategies are framed as governmental tyranny.
A qualifier before ending: though the right is the major source of opposition to Common Core, it isn’t the only source. Teachers’ unions have complained that they don’t have the time, means, and proper training to implement the standards. But this opposition doesn’t stem from the content of the standards themselves, it’s not widespread among Democrats—almost all of whom support the Core—and it has not lead to any mainstream attempts by the left to repeal the new laws.
There’s one key similarity and one key difference with conservatives here: except for the rightists who fear that Common Core is Obama’s attempt at liberal indoctrination, Republicans, like Dems, typically do not object to the content of the program, per se. Rather, unlike the Dems, GOPers object to the idea of non-local governments exerting any form of vision over the goals of public education—an idea that they’ve been fiercely, and hypocritically, promoting for decades.
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