The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids

by Joy Pullmann

Overview

Most Americans had no idea what Common Core was in 2013, according to polls. But it had been creeping into schools nationwide over the previous three years, and children were feeling its effects. They cried over math homework so mystifying their parents could not help them, even in elementary school. They read motley assortments of “informational text” instead of classic literature. They dreaded the high-stakes tests, in unfamiliar formats, that were increasingly controlling their classrooms.

How did this latest and most sweeping “reform” of American education come in mostly under the radar? Joy Pullmann started tugging on a thread of reports from worried parents and frustrated teachers, and it led to a big tangle of history and politics, intrigue and arrogance. She unwound it to discover how a cabal of private foundation honchos and unelected public officials cooked up a set of rules for what American children must learn in core K–12 classes, and how the Obama administration pressured states to adopt them. Thus a federalized education scheme took root, despite legal prohibitions against federal involvement in curriculum.

Common Core and its testing regime were touted as “an absolute game-changer in public education,” yet the evidence so far suggests that kids are actually learning less under it. Why, then, was such a costly and disruptive agenda imposed on the nation’s schools? Who benefits? And how can citizens regain local self-governance in education, so their children’s minds will be fed a more nourishing intellectual diet and be protected from the experiments of emboldened bureaucrats? The Education Invasion offers answers and remedies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594038815
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	03/14/2017
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Joy Pullmann is managing editor of The Federalist and an education research fellow at the Heartland Institute. She received a Robert Novak journalism fellowship to fund research and reporting on Common Core. Pullmann has taught at grade levels from preschool to high school, tutored college students, and written public-speaking curriculum. A graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs, she lives in the Midwest with her husband and four young children.

Read an Excerpt

Jamie Highfill entered the classroom in 2002 as an eighth-grade English teacher in Fayetteville, Arkansas. A Gulf War veteran, she had no idea that she was stepping onto another battle field.

Highfill quickly proved to be an excellent teacher. Her specialty was preparing students for Advanced Placement classes in high school, which can earn students college credit. In 2005, she was selected as codirector of the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project at the University of Arkansas, a local affiliate of an international writing program that attracts some of the world’s best teachers. In 2011, the Arkansas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts named her Middle School English Teacher of the Year. In the 2011–12 school year, 77 percent of her students scored “advanced” on state tests. That’s an amazing success rate. Typically, no more than one-quarter of students score “advanced” on state English tests, even the less rigorous ones.

Highfill’s eighth graders learned about comedy and political satire from James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” They read Arthurian legends, poems by Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. They learned about internal dialogue, quest literature, parody, and symbolism. Highfill’s guide for choosing assignments was Henry David Thoreau’s maxim, “Read the best books first, or you might not have a chance to read them at all.”

When Arkansas signed on to the Common Core curriculum man- dates in 2010 — to be followed later by national tests to enforce them — Highfill joined the committee her school convened to decide how to put the mandates into place. Schools across the country created similar committees.

In the era of “education accountability,” curriculum mandates spell out the learning requirements that annual tests assess. The national Common Core tests measure only reading and math to fulfill the federal mandates, but Common Core actually asserts authority over the entire curriculum, since its English mandates also apply to “literacy in history/ social studies, science, and technical subjects. A series of grant competitions and executive rewrites of federal education law during the first year of the Obama presidency ensured that Common Core would determine far more than what teachers hand to children in the classroom. The administration required schools to use Common Core test results in evaluating, ranking, hiring, firing, and even redistributing teachers, and required states to use the results to judge and rank schools and even to take them over from local authorities.

Unlike most teachers, Highfill had paid attention to how Common Core became her boss. When she got a look at the mandates, she was dismayed at what they would do to the extraordinarily rich lessons she had been providing her students.

In language arts, Common Core explicitly requires schools to give “much greater attention to a specific category of informational text — literary nonfiction — than has been traditional.” A graph included in the standards document shows an increasing nonfiction intake through the school years: 50 percent in fourth grade, 55 percent in eighth grade, 70 percent in twelfth grade. This requirement alarmed Highfill, who had achieved great success with her students by feeding them a diet replete with poetry and short stories and classic novels.

“Where is the research that proves more nonfiction is better for students?” she asked. “What about inferencing skills that you only get with fiction and poetry? That was my whole issue: please, tell me where the research says this is better for kids.” Indeed, research indicates that students’ experience with high-quality fiction is a major predictor of their college success, while it finds nothing of the kind for nonfiction.

Highfill expressed her concerns to some colleagues. When administrators asked teachers what they thought about Common Core, Highfill and others began pointing out its flaws, but the principal said, “You guys are being too negative.” The administration, said Highfill, “wanted us to accept the document lock, stock, and barrel.”

Table of Contents

Prologue What Happened to My Children's School? 7

Chapter 1 Origins - Nationalizing Education under the Radar 15

Chapter 2 Experience - The Common Core Classroom 48

Chapter 3 Control - One Test to Rule Them All 76

Chapter 4 Backlash - Taking On the System 112

Chapter 5 Disillusionment - Teachers Need a Voice, Too 150

Chapter 6 Alternatives - Parents Find a Way for Their Kids 165

Chapter 7 Reboot - Educating Free Citizens 192

Resources for Parents and Teachers 213

Acknowledgments 215

Notes 217

Index 251