Can Obama Find A Cure For The Common Core?

by Igor Volsky   

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When the nation's state education chiefs and the National Governors Association came together in 2009 to develop comprehensive education standards for America's schoolchildren, they surely couldn't have imagined that they would be compared to Nazis or accused of colluding with the Muslim Brotherhood.
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But today, in towns and cities across America, the once bipartisan goal of ensuring that a fifth grader in Georgia has the same skills as a fifth grader in California and that both will be able to compete in the global economy is under attack from all sides. Tea Party activists see the standards as a federal government takeover of the education system. Liberal critics charge that the goals were developed by education experts with little experience in the classroom who are obsessed with testing children and using those assessments in teacher evaluations and promotions. And on Thursday, the nation's largest teachers union pulled back its strong endorsement of Common Core, arguing that while its members "supported the goals of the standards," their implementation "has been completely botched." The National Education Association is calling on state lawmakers to delay and possibly rewrite some of the standards, change the related assessments and better incorporate teacher input.
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This is the story of how a program adopted by almost every state in the union and supported by prominent leaders from both political parties has become a rallying cry that's united President Obama's critics and allies. The controversy surrounding the standards threatens to undermine one of the administration's most important priorities, build a powerful political alliance that could shape the nation's politics for years to come, and significantly undermine the effort to raise the country's education.

Our educational leadership is floundering