It seems that the narrative of how Common Core came to be is now going off the rails. Instead of the story that had it that it was a push outside of formal government processes, we now see that billionaire and tech mogul Bill Gates decided that money well placed at the right legislative times and to those at the right levers of powers basically hoodwinked people into thinking that this was an organic process. Just the fact that it effectively came about out of nowhere should have had BS antennas whipping back almost fast enough to have liftoff that local control of education was to be superseded by a national agenda. Now the smoking gun:
The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.
So they turned to the richest man in the world.
On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.
…After the meeting, weeks passed with no word. Then Wilhoit got a call: Gates was in. What followed was one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in education policy in U.S. history.
Regardless of where you stand on the issue, this is history I (and probably you) have not seen or heard before. Stanley Kurtz over at The Corner has this to say on this Progressive runaround how the basic structure of society’s decision making process (democratically decided decisions by voters and their representatives) was railroaded:
When the story of the Common Core is finally told, it’s going to be ugly. It’s going to show how the sponsors of the Common Core made a mockery of the Constitution and the democratic process. It’s going to show how the Obama administration pressed a completely untested reform on the states, evading public debate at both the federal and state levels. It’s going to show how a deliberative process that ought to have taken years was compressed into a matter of months. It’s going to show how legitimate philanthropic funding for an experimental education reform morphed into a gross abuse of democracy. It’s going to show how the Obama Education Department intentionally obscured the full extent of its pressure on the states, even as it effectively federalized the nation’s education system. It’s going to show how Common Core is turning the choice of private — especially Catholic — education into no choice at all.
“This is the story that opponents of the Common Core have been telling for some time, only to see it dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theory.”
As we have seen with this Obama Administration, many have been astonished with what it has done oft times outstrips even the most outlandish conspiracy theories – so much so that many of us, who would have normally dismissed many of these right out of hand, now go “Hmmm, this could be true” simply based on history. One simple example – whodda evah thought that an American President would have sided with Iranian Mullahs even as the Iranian people stage their Green Revolution for democracy?
