Did duplicity about Common Core’s standards help lead to national incivility and voter alienation?
The current degradation of the presidential campaign (it seems to be about who can better smear the other major candidate) and the purported alienation of many voters may have begun in 2009/2010 with the duplicitous campaign to trick the public into buying an empty set of K-12 skills described as "rigorous" standards, supposedly aimed at developing "deeper understanding" and "critical thinking skills." By now it is clear that this multi-tentacled project was intended to centralize education policy making in this country and to close "gaps" by letting distant bureaucrats base pass scores on unvetted test items. It is also clear that most of this duplicitous campaign was financed by (1) a multi-billionaire intent on changing his public image from a vulture capitalist to a benevolent philanthropist—and (2) the lure of tax money doled out by his friends in the U.S. Department of Education to willing bureaucrats in state agencies and on state boards across the country. They and their high-tech friends are the only ones who have demonstrably gained anything from this project—certainly not the low-achieving kids that most education organizations claim to want to protect.
Many voters won't accept the possibility that there could even be a connection between the Common Core project (with "rebranded" standards in almost all states that bought the original package) and the current presidential campaign. But those who have watched the corruption of our public education system metastacize through the publishing world, our academic institutions and related agencies, our state judiciaries and justice systems, and our media can think of no stronger influence on our public institutions than a project that was "rotten to the core," led by education charlatans (not one had ever come up with or implemented a demonstrably effective policy in education), and protested from the start by people with skin in the game—their own children in Common Cored schools.
