Ben Velderman
EAGnews
3/19/2014
Common Core money man Bill Gates appeared on a news show last Sunday to once again defend the K-12 experiment against charges that it will erode state and local control of public education.
“(Common Core) is not a federal takeover. Nobody’s pushing for that,” Gates said.
Gates’ proclamation was the latest in a string of assurances from Common Core proponents to a skeptical public that the nationalized learning standards – which tell educators which academic concepts to teach students in each grade level – will not shift education-related decisions from state lawmakers and local school boards to bureaucrats in faraway Washington D.C.
Those guarantees are far-less ironclad, however, when Common Core backers talk among themselves.
In an overlooked op-ed from last November, former National Education Association Executive Director John Wilson called on the two private organizations that created the learning standards to also create a “Common Core Czar” to “oversee the implementation, call out bad practices and recommend policy changes to the politicians.”
Wilson – who now works for the nonprofit arm of pro-Common Core textbook publisher Pearson – added that the czar “should offer a new vision of (student) testing that differentiates between accountability and instruction.”…
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