Against the Common Core

[Draggingtree]

Hoover Institution: Against the Common Core

by Williamson M. Evers

Thursday, September 4, 2014

 

Editor’s note: This essay has been adapted from the testimony of Williamson M. Evers before the Rules & Reference Committee of the Ohio House of Representatives, August 19, 2014.

 

The question I would like to address is: Do the Common Core national curriculum-content standards undermine “competitive federalism,” which is a feature of our Madisonian system of federalism?

 

First, I want to discuss federalism under our Constitution as designed by James Madison. What is federalism? U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a recent case that the allocation of powers as set forth in the Constitution sets legal “boundaries” between the federal government and the states and provides a way for each of them to maintain their “integrity.” But, just as importantly, having a system of federalism “secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power.”

 

Thus, there is vertical federalism between the states and the federal government, and there is horizontal federalism among, for example,

[Draggingtree]

Bill Bennett paid to pimp for Common Core shills gonna shill

By: streiff (Diary) | September 16th, 2014 at 02:00 PM

 

Last week Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett appeared on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal called The Conservative Case for Common Core.

 

That’s the fundamental idea behind a core curriculum: preserving and emphasizing what’s essential, in fields like literature and math, to a worthwhile education. It is also, by the way, a conservative idea.

 

In the op-ed, Bennett dangles a bewildering series of non-sequiturs before the reader:

 

When I was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the 1980s, I asked 250 people across the political spectrum what 10 books every student should be familiar with by the time they finish high school. Almost every person agreed on five vital sources: the Bible, Shakespeare, America’s founding documents, the great American novel “Huckleberry Finn ” and classical works of mythology and poetry, like the Iliad and the Odyssey.

http://www.redstate.com/2014/09/16/bill-bennett-paid-pimp-common-core/