Lies They Told You About Common Core

Amazingly, the Common Core project was sold to state boards and school administrators as "state-led." (See, for example, here.) Even so, it was never designed to be accountable to the states that presumably promoted it despite the well-known fact that the federal government pays for only about 8 to 10 percent of the costs of public education on average across states.

How sets of English language arts and mathematics standards (and, later, matching science standards) created by non-experts selected (so far as we know) by Achieve Inc. (a D.C.-based organization developed in the 1990s to assess state standards) and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation got adopted legally by (generally speaking) mathematically and scientifically ignorant state boards of education is a complex story. This story is carefully told in Joy Pullmann's newly published and very readable book The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids (Encounter Books, 2017).