Trump Talks Bigly on Common Core—But Still Hasn’t Killed It

They number among President Trump’s most dedicated supporters. For decades, they have fought the good fight—on their own time and on their own dime—against politicians and pundits enriched by billions of dollars from the federal government and some of the world’s wealthiest foundations. They endured steady streams of abuse and ridicule from some pundits, journalists, and politicians. Other pundits, who may or may not be sympathetic, declare that they won the battle against the overwhelming odds. But they know that they did not.

They supported Donald Trump because he seemed to agree with them, articulating their frustrations, clamorously and unequivocally. “Common Core is a disaster,” he said, “Common Core means Washington tells you what to study.” He has been proven right on both counts.

Those supporters are soccer moms who observe Common Core’s effects up close with their own children. They are local activists who recognized Common Core right away for what it was: the latest in a long string of progressive education white elephants. They had seen it all before, for example, in the calamitous “New Standards” projects in California, Kentucky, and Maryland around the turn of the century. Those states eventually mustered the good sense to cut bait and release those dysfunctional programs, only to have the same program designed by the same people imposed upon them from above a decade later.

Common Core’s primary selling point in the late 2000s and early 2010s was to standardize learning standards across states so that state performance could be compared on a common metric—apples to apples, as it were. The biannual National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) already compared state student achievement. But, advocates argued, NAEP was not based on a common curriculum across states, offering laggard states an excuse that NAEP made apples-to-oranges comparisons.

[RELATED: The Real Common Core Story]

National standards were not new. But most national standards, before and after Common Core, have been voluntary (e.g., the National Mathematics Standards, National Standards for Civics and Government). In the spirit of the U.S. Constitution’s 10^th Amendment—the “reserved powers” text—states decided if and how to adopt. With Common Core, school and state adherence to a single common standard is tested, which is a recipe for disappointment in a culture that refuses to acknowledge that students differ widely in aptitude and motivation.

Even opponents admitted that the Common Core Standards were more difficult than the average learning standards across states at the time. But most of Common Core’s “higher rigor” occurs in the early grades, even in kindergarten and first grade, where such rigor may well be age-inappropriate (i.e., too early). Common Core’s rigor peters out in the middle grades. In high school, the “slow-moving train simply stops.” The years following Common Core implementation saw state after state easing upper-grade curricular requirements that had been painstakingly arranged during the previous two decades. The widespread shift of Algebra 1 from seventh or eighth grade back to ninth or tenth received considerable attention in the press.

Few scholars and pundits spoke up to support the soccer moms and other activist Common Core opponents, most having been bought off or intimidated by the abundant funds and sinecures offered by Common Core’s sponsors. The Boston think tank, Pioneer Institute, was one of the few relatively prominent organizations to refuse offers of funding from Common Core’s lead proselytizers, the Gates Foundation and its allies. Understanding what made the earlier Massachusetts Education Miracle work, and with one of the Miracle’s architects on its board, Pioneer saw clearly through the hype. Still today, Pioneer’s web pages offer a thorough and, unfortunately, still relevant repudiation of Common Core’s many fallacies.

The current leading fallacy asserts that Common Core is dead, having been killed by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, which, allegedly, returned decision-making to the states. But, in effect, the only significant element of Common Core that ESSA removed was that single most frequently offered justification for its existence—comparability of test scores across states. With ESSA, states were allowed to change the standards each used to suit. Most tinkered with the standards only slightly enough to claim that they had changed them, but also enough to invalidate any test score comparisons across states.

States left the Common Core Standards largely intact, retaining all the progressive education detritus, such as explaining one’s answer, solving problems in a variety of ways, favoring informational over literary texts, group projects, discovery learning, and unreliable, costly, time-consuming open-ended test items. These “deeper learning” extras not only added unnecessary confusion but also slowed the learning process. As a result, Common Core–educated students often arrive in high school a year or two behind where they would have been under previous, higher-quality state standards (e.g., California, Massachusetts, Indiana, Virginia).

Furthermore, in response to complaints of too much testing in the early 2010s, most consequential state testing programs, such as those with middle- or high school exit examinations, were dropped in favor of the federally required Common Core tests. Most of those state tests had included stakes (e.g., diploma or not) and feedback (e.g., from multiple opportunities to pass). Hundreds of scholarly studies over the past century reveal strong positive effects of stakes and feedback on student learning. The Common Core tests, focusing as they allegedly do on school-level accountability, lack both student stakes and student feedback.

Since Common Core’s implementation in the early 2010s, U.S. student test score trends have declined on a range of measures, including the NAEP, the ACT, the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Moreover, the “gap” between high and low U.S. scorers generally widened over time.

[RELATED: More Decline in the U. of Chicago Core]

Still, the Common Core Standards remain very much alive, and over 90 percent unchanged. They now dress themselves, however, in their new nomenclature of “college and career readiness” standards or simply “high-quality” standards, assessments, and tests.

Is Donald Trump really opposed to the Common Core Standards? A long string of incongruities dating back to his first administration prompts one to ask.

A disconnect between the policy expressed and the policy implemented emerged with his first search for a Secretary of Education. Shortly after his 2016 election victory, Trump narrowed his pool of candidates to three women—Michelle Rhee, Eva Moskowitz, and Betsy DeVos—all strong proponents of the Common Core Standards.

The one selected, Betsy DeVos, had played leading roles in several pro-Common Core organizations, including Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, The Great Lakes Education Project, the American Federation for Children, and the Kasich for President campaign.

Then, the DeVos-led U.S. Department of Education (ED) surprised many by maintaining the annual state testing reporting requirement. This cudgel remained available from the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, to threaten any states that veered too far away from “high quality,” “college and career readiness” standards and tests. This had the effect of discouraging states from making substantial changes to their standards, ironically cementing the Common Core standards in place.

These events disappointed many Trump supporters opposed to Common Core, of course. But, where else could they turn? Mainstream Democrats and “Chamber of Commerce Republicans” alike loved the Common Core, some no doubt sincerely, and others because they were paid handsomely for their public displays of affection.

Some Common Core opponents I’ve spoken with resist blaming President Trump directly for these outcomes. They argue that education was never his priority, that Betsy DeVos was essentially a Jeb Bush pick, and that he may have been—and may still be—misled by his team of advisors.

Perhaps. But were those same advisors also responsible for the deep antagonism to Common Core that he so often expressed during his 2016 presidential campaign? Or was that really him?

DeVos hardly represents the only conservative who was tempted to hop on the Common Core bandwagon. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute began as a typical local charity funding Dayton, Ohio, soup kitchens and health clinics, run by Thomas’ widow. When the Alzheimer’s afflicted widow passed away in turn, foundation control suddenly shifted to the unrelated Finn Family, under mysterious circumstances.

Under Finn’s control, the Fordham Institute became an influential Washington, D.C., think tank focused on education policy, sustained largely by the Fordham fortune for years. Like many other education policy opinion leaders, however, Fordham was invited in the mid-2000s by the Gates Foundation to join its Common Core alliance. It chose to, and so it remains, among the most prominent promoters of the Common Core outside of the Gates Foundation itself. Some of its many Gates Foundation grants clearly specify that the money is to be used to promote the standards.

With Fordham, Common Core promoters can claim that a prominent “conservative” organization supports them. This, even though the Fordham Institute has now adopted most progressive education tropes about standards and testing, and its president endorsed Kamala Harris for U.S. President.

Since the early 2000s, the Gates and Walton Family Foundations alone bestowed over $14 million and $9 million, respectively, upon the Fordham Institute. Most of those fighting the good fight against them worked with no funding at all.

Only eight months in, President Trump is once again presented with an opportunity to demonstrate his opposition to the Common Core and the out-of-touch elites who promote it. That is, if he is first willing to admit that it still exists.

[RELATED: Common Core–The Elites Did It]

Indications thus far appear unpromising. The relevant passage in the recently released proposed budget for the ED reads like it was written by the Gates Foundation:

The [budget] Request would help States continue to administer high-quality aligned assessment systems as part of their ongoing implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Annual, high-quality, statewide assessments aligned to challenging State academic standards are a critical element of the statewide accountability systems that each State must establish under the Act, providing parents and educators with information they need to understand whether students are meeting State-determined college- and career-ready academic standards. (U.S. Department of Education Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Summary, p.14)

In other words, no change. Common Core forever!

The ED’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) ran surveys, collected and analyzed data, conducted research, and awarded grants to outsiders who conducted still more research. Most of its personnel and contracts have recently been purged. The Trump administration plans to rebuild almost from scratch.

Anyone given responsibility for overseeing that reconstruction retains enormous power to shape and steer U.S. education research for years to come. The Trump Administration has chosen that person. She is the Senior Vice President for Research at the Fordham Institute, where she has worked for the past 17 years. She was also an author or co-author on a cornucopia of pro-Common Core propaganda reports, ranking arguably among the planet’s most prolific writers in advocacy for the Common Core.

Image: “common core cartoon” by WWYD? on Flickr