Last
week, conservative talk show host and media mogul Glenn Beck decided to
let his listeners in on what he dubbed "the biggest story in American
history." It's called System X. "If you don't stop it," he
warned, "American history is over as you know it."
As Beck explained it, a little-known Department of Education program,
supported by rich philanthropists, business interests, and the United
Nations, was turning public schools into the world’s next great
data-mining frontier. Using carrots offered up in the 2009 stimulus
bill, the federal government and its contractors could compile hundreds
of points of data on your kids and use it for who knows what. The
result: "System X: a government run by a single party in control of
labor, media, education, and banking; joined by big business to further
their mutual collective goals."
The gateway to this dystopian future, which Beck predicted would lead to some portions of the United States embracing
Nazism,
was President Barack Obama's controversial push for a new national
curriculum known as Common Core. The conspirators are far-ranging.
Rupert Murdoch is in on it. So is the American Legislative Exchange
Council, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Jeb Bush.
Beck's not the only person fighting Common Core. Lawmakers in 18
states have considered legislation to block the implementation of the
curriculum standards. Five—Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and
Virginia—have successfully rejected or partially rejected Common Core.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell reiterated his opposition to Common Core in
late March, just one week after Texas Gov. Rick Perry went on Beck's
program to denounce it.
On the most basic level, the fight over Common Core is same fight
parents and policymakers have been waging over public education for the
last century, centering on two basic questions: What is the appropriate
level of federal involvement in local schooling? And if we did settle on
an umbrella curriculum, what should it actually look like? Education
reformer
Diane Ravitch,
for one, opposes Common Core on the grounds that, while there should be
a set of national education tenets, she believes "such standards should
be voluntary, not imposed by the federal government."
But in the hands of activists like Beck, Common Core has taken on a
more ominous tone. The long-standing fever swamp fears of enforced
secularism and multiculturalism, like those promoted by now-Rep. Michele
Bachmann (R-Minn.)
in the 1990s, have been given a digital makeover.
The core itself is what it sounds like—a broad curriculum standard.
States that choose to accept Common Core gain access to a pot of
billions of federal dollars. Social conservatives have never liked that
kind of incentive game, especially when it's connected to a Democratic
president. (GOP Rep. Rob Bishop, whose Utah district is ground zero for
the anti-Common Core movement, called the Common Core a "hook" from
which the state could never extricate itself.)
According to its critics, the most nefarious consequence of Common
Core is a data collection program that's part of the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus). The idea is to better track student
demographic and achievement data to figure out what's working and
what's not, and respond accordingly. Some of the biggest names in
American politics and business support the idea. In 2011, the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation
teamed up
with the Carnegie Foundation and an educational subsidiary of Rupert
Murdoch's News Corp. to develop a database of student data that states
can access for free until 2015. (After that it will charge an annual
fee.) At a speech at the White House last November, Shawn T. Bay, CEO of
the education data company eScholar,
called Common Core "the glue that actually ties everything together" in the Department of Education's Big Data push.
A writer at the anti-core site Truth in Education synthesized the movement's fears
thusly:
There will be a massive data tracking system on each child with over
400 points of information collected. This information can be shared
among organizations and companies and parents don’t have to be informed
about what data is being collecting. They will collect information such
as: your child's academic records, health care history, disciplinary
record, family income range, family voting status, and religious
affiliation, to name a few. Big brother will be watching your child from
preschool till college (P20 Longitudinal Data System). You, the parent,
are UNABLE to opt your child out of this tracking system.
According to anti-Common Core activists, the government won't only
collect student data from test scores and paperwork—they'll also use
actual lab experiments. Beck cited a February
draft report
released by the Department of Education on the future of learning
technology. Among other things, the report highlighted studies that had
used tools such as a "wireless skin conductance sensor," "functional
magnetic resonance imaging," and a "posture analysis seat" to measure
how students learn. As Beck
put it, "This is like some really spooky, sci-fi,
Gattaca
kind of thing." But the Department of Education draft report didn't
actually recommend that these tools be incorporated into the classroom.
Critics also take issue with what's in the standards—particularly the math portion. Writing about the math standards in
The Atlantic last November, retired educator Barry Garelick
feared that kids would become "'little mathematicians' who don't know how to do actual math."
But as Kathleen Porter-Magee and Sol Stern point out at the conservative
National Review Online,
much of the criticism about the contents of Common Core has been based
on misinformation, if not "deliberate misunderstanding."
Although
conservative critics like Michelle Malkin allege that Common Core
brushes aside classics such as
To Kill a Mockingbird, it in fact holds up Harper Lee’s novel as an "
examplar" of what students should be taught.
For now, most GOP lawmakers' concerns about the Common Core focus on
the curriculum and the idea of federal control, not Big Data. But the
Obama administration is wary of Common Core taking on a life of its own
in the conservative fever swamps. Last February, when South Carolina
Republican Gov. Nikki Haley suggested she might block the implementation
of Common Core in her state, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
released a statement
punching back.
Citing the endorsements of Republican governors like Mitch Daniels of
Indiana, Bill Haslam of Tennessee, and Chris Christie of New Jersey,
Duncan dismissed Haley's concerns as little more than tinfoil-hat
trolling: "The idea that the Common Core standards are
nationally-imposed is a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy."
Then again, when has that ever stopped Glenn Beck?
Reporter
Tim Murphy is a reporter at Mother Jones. Email him with tips and insights at tmurphy [at] motherjones [dot] com. |
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