Common Core supporters looking for useful advice from Rick Hess won't find much.

Common Core supporters looking for useful advice from Rick Hess won’t find much.

Would Common Core garnered more support from the many movement conservatives now opposed to them? That the question American Enterprise Institute education czar Rick Hess, raised yesterday in the latest in a series of occasional pieces on the battle between supporters and opponents of the standards. From where he sits, the answer is clearly in the affirmative. From where he sits, Hess argues that Common Core supporters could have at the very least won over at least some movement conservatives (along with others opposed to the standards) if they had made “the public case, educate parents and voters, or engaged their critics”. Common Core supporters would have also done well if the standards — and the Obama Administration’s implicit support for them — haven’t put conservative and Republican allies such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on the defensive with movement conservatives. But because, in his view, Common Core supporters never bothered to do so — and in fact, were happy to gain the Obama Administration’s implicit support for the standards — the standards have become “sucked into the maw of a broad, ideological debate” for which “they’ve mostly themselves to blame.” Along the lines of previous broadsides against Common Core supporters Hess has previously leveled, the insinuation is that Common Core supporters have not seriously engaged the arguments made by movement conservatives and other opponents to the standards.

statelogoNow your editor will definitely agree that Common Core supporters have done an atrocious job of outreach, both to the public at large and to movement conservatives in particular.  I can’t count on all my fingers and toes the number of ant-Common Core e-mails I have received over the past two years from the Pioneer Institute. On the other hand, I cannot count the number of e-mails touting the standards from its supporters, especially the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association, the two groups who developed them. Conservative reformers supporting the standards, in particular, were far too restrained in challenging the misinformation and conspiracy-theorizing of fellow-travelers such as syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin and the Pioneer Institute until March, when Dropout Nation challenged them to take them with fire in the belly.  And while Common Core has been the subject of public discussion since CCSSO and NGA rolled out plans to develop and implement the standards four years ago, a stronger public information campaign would at the very least given families more information to use in deciding where they stood. Common Core supporters should have learned a long time ago that they must articulate their positions (and define yourself) early and often — or let the opposition cast your positions in the worst possible light.

The fact that Common Core supporters haven’t even bothered to rally those reformers who reach poor and minority families — especially in suburbia — who are the worst-served by American public education and would wholeheartedly support Common Core is also quite shameful. CNN Commentator Dr. Steve Perry (along with yours truly) has been among the foremost voices supporting the standards. But Common Core supporters have never bothered to tap him or his considerable audience, much less reach out to other leading black and Latino figures already predisposed to lending their support. Native education organizations such as the National Indian Education Association and Kamehameha Schools are developing approaches to implementation that allow Native communities to incorporate their cultural and language learning into the standards. Those groups have never been tapped. There are even professors and teachers who are clearly mapping out how Common Core’s standards are aligned with those of the top-performing nations in math; one is Sheron Brown, who has put together an easy-to-use collection of resources on the standards. Yet Common Core’s leading forces have not bothered to reach out to any of these players in order to bolster support. Common Core supporters should be rallying all their supporters, and in fact, let them be the public face of the standards. Especially in a time in which movement conservatives, in general, have a hard time making a case to minorities or even to the less-rabid in the base — and especially as the United States becomes a majority-minority nation — it is hard for conservatives to argue against Common Core without being reminded that their position shines a harsh light on their greatest weakness.

Yet Hess is incorrect in arguing that Common Core supporters haven’t engaged the opposition. They have done so, and for the most part, in a serious and fair manner. In fact, given the conspiracy-theorizing and the other silliness undertaken by Common Core foes (with the more-serious opponents willing to let them behave badly), many of those opposing the standards have been given more credence than they deserve. This isn’t to say that Common Core supporters could have done a better job of challenging the points of the opposition, or even that some of them didn’t go too far in their rhetoric. Democrat for Education Reform’s Indiana chief, Larry Grau, may have actually done some damage to the bipartisan school reform movement in the Hoosier State when he put together a series of attack pieces belittling Common Core foes such as state Sen. Scott Schneider. The attack on Schneider, in particular, likely cause a split within the Indianapolis-based Republican coalition formed five decades ago by now-former U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar of which both Schneider and Lugar’s most-successful protégé — and the Hoosier State’s leading reformer — former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, are both a part. Not a smart move for either DFER or other Democrat reformers in a state in which Republicans will likely have full control of the statehouse for at least the rest of this decade. But save for Grau’s misbehavior, Common Core supporters have worked hard to engage an opposition that has often engaged the discussion in craven intellectually dishonest ways.

Meanwhile Hess fails to admit the reality is that even if the Obama Administration didn’t implicitly support Common Core implementation, there would still have been plenty of opposition to the effort from movement conservatives who generally pay no mind to education issues. This isn’t to say that Common Core supporters couldn’t have made a strong conservative case for supporting the standards. But one has to also admit that the odds for winning over many movement conservatives on this issue (as opposed to school choice, which appeals more to their sentiments at least on an abstract level) would have been long anyway.

For one, as my friend, RealClearReligion Editor Jeremy Lott, always notes, the very idea of federal, state, or even local government involvement in education is an anathema to many movement conservatives (as well as to all but a few idiosyncratic libertarians). If they had their way, the districts and other super-clusters within American public education would just go out of business altogether; they fundamentally don’t understand why reformers would want to engage in any overhaul of what they consider a useless exercise. The belief among some movement conservatives that government implementation of curricula is akin to the indoctrination of their children (a perspective shared by hard-core progressives) also plays a part. There is no empirical justification for this viewpoint. Districts doing poorly in instructing children in math and reading aren’t going to do any better on the propaganda front; more importantly, as Friedrich Hayek succinctly observed in The Road to Serfdom, higher levels of education usually equal more differentiation in views and beliefs. But views need not be driven by objective data to be long-held.

Then there are movement conservatives whose views are more philosophically-driven than centered on ideology. For them, Common Core is an anathema because it disturbs districts, the institutions near and dear to them. For these conservatives, the very idea that states are asserting their constitutionally-granted authority to shape education disturbs their general desire for the mythical concept of local control of education by districts (and the underlying conceit that government that is theoretically closest to the people is the one that governs best). It is why township governments remain in place in Indianapolis, Ind. — and fiercely defended by philosophical conservatives from being eliminated — long after the consolidation of the nation’s 12th-largest city into Marion County essentially made those operations obsolete. The fact that most districts are just as bureaucratic (if not more so) than state and federal agencies, along with the failure of districts to provide high-quality education, should make these particular conservatives think things over; so should the fact that districts and their ability to use their dependence on local tax dollars to justify restrictions on the very school choice efforts these and other movement conservatives support.

There’s also the fact that Common Core is also caught up in the lingering disenchantment among movement conservatives with the presidency of Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush (as well as the overall recriminations within the conservative movement that happens any time the Republican Party fails to win a presidential election). As with Bill Clinton (whose centrist tendencies and acquiescence on issues such as welfare reform would make him the best Democrat Republicans ever had — even if they loathe to admit it), Bush’s compassionate conservative agenda and willingness to expand the role of the federal government in areas such as Medicaid made him the kind of Republican that Democrats should favor (despite their disdain for his overall agenda); the fact that Bush’s presidency ended so miserably adds to the dismay. As with progressives within Democratic Party, who spent much of the time after Al Gore’s loss to Bush purging the Clinton agenda, movement conservatives have also been doing all they can to purge the Republican Party of any policy tied to Bush. Given that Common Core is in many ways an extension of Bush’s signature education reform effort, the No Child Left Behind Act, efforts to implement the standards were always going to be troublesome at best.

There’s also the fact that many Republicans and conservatives who do support Common Core don’t necessarily have the credibility that this current generation of movement conservatives (including the Tea Party element that emerged amid Obama’s victorious presidential campaign five years ago) demand. Certainly Christie may be more conservative than much of the Garden State’s electorate — and clearly more-conservative than predecessors such as Christine Todd Whitman and Tom Kean. But many in the movement conservative ranks consider Christie to be a conservative in name only and in fact, has lambasted him for moves such as his berating of congressional Republicans last year after they wouldn’t approve a pork barrel-ridden package of disaster relief for residents recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the most-prominent Republican championing Common Core and as much of a conservative as anyone within the GOP ranks, is considered by many movement conservatives to be the kind of “Republican establishment” type they loathe. Some of the antipathy is due to the fact that both men are on the wrong side of the Stalinist ideological cleaning happening within both movement conservative and Republican ranks; this latest cleansing, in turn, can be traced back to the efforts of an earlier generation of conservatives in the 1980s to rid both the movement and the GOP of those they considered to be heretics to their positions. [Oddly enough, that generation of conservatives, including Hess’ former AEI colleague, David Frum, ended up being subjected to the same Stalinist tactics in the last few years.] In any case, simply being conservative or Republican isn’t enough, especially among those who already think that public education is nothing more than left-of-center indoctrination.

Add into all this the split between conservative reformers who support Common Core such as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli, and those among their ranks who oppose the standards, including Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas and Stanford University’s Williamson Evers. Certainly the disagreement between the two conservative reform camps is a conflict of visions between standards-and-accountability activists such as Finn and Petrilli (who have long ago realized that the patchwork of state-level curricula standards would only go so far in advancing systemic reform) and the belief of hardcore school choice advocates such as Greene, who along with colleague Greg Forster of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, argue that school choice is the silver bullet for what ails American public education. At the same time, because Common Core has been adopted by states such as California and Massachusetts, the standards also are a threat to the legacies of Evers (who helped craft the Golden State’s math standards as well as its effort to provide all kids in middle school grades with Algebra 1), as well as Sandra Stotsky (who put together the Bay State’s now-abolished standards). Greene’s longstanding (and at times, sensible) animus against the Gates Foundation’s efforts on the education front — and Fordham’s decision to help the foundation support Common Core — also makes the split as much personal as it is about what each side believes is the best approach to systemic reform.

Given the willingness of one group of conservative reformers to aid and abet those who oppose implementation of the standards, there’s little way those supporting the standards would have made headway with their fellow-travelers outside of the school reform movement. Add in the false narrative about No Child having greatly (and harmfully) expanded the federal role — one touted both by conservative reformers who support Common Core such as Petrilli and skeptics such as Hess — which feeds into the arguments of Common Core foes against the standards, and suddenly, it is really hard to win allies among movement conservatives with a general disdain for any federal or state role in education. Hess’ own willingness to dismiss the powerful role of No Child in fostering the conditions for reform that have led to more than 217,000 fewer children struggling with literacy in 2011 than eight years earlier — even to the point of ignoring data in a study AEI released that details the impacts — has helped feed into the misconceptions of movement conservatives. Which, in turn, has made them less than willing to consider the benefits of Common Core in providing children with the college-preparatory curricula they need and deserve.

The poisoning of the well for Common Core by Hess in particular isn’t just limited to whether policymaking should be a national activity. One of the underlying reasons behind the development of the standards is to stem the racial-, ethnic-, and gender-based achievement gaps that are the most-visible symptom of the nation’s education crisis; in the process, it also improves curricula for those students who are already high-performing. Yet Hess’ own arguments that what he calls an  “achievement gap mania” that has siphoned research, policymaking and funding away from addressing other educational issues, and “has pushed all other considerations to the periphery” (while conveniently ignoring the scores of efforts on the reform front that have occurred that help all children, as well as his unwillingness to deal with the fact that focusing on achievement gaps helps half of the nation’s children), has also given aid and comfort to those movement conservatives opposed to the standards (as well as their traditionalist and progressive counterparts) who could care less about the futures of poor and minority kids.

Simply put, Hess can’t offer any useful advice to Common Core foes because his own rhetoric is part of the reason movement conservatives oppose the standards in the first place. It’s better to ignore Hess on this matter than pay him any more mind.