Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune published a compelling editorial defending Common Core, a set of proposed educational standards for U.S. students that was met first with overwhelming support and then with vitriol.
The Common Core debate is pretty messy and, as you may have guessed, mired by political interest. Common Core was embraced by the Obama administration in 2009 and thus defected by the GOP — who, according to the Tribune, said that though the program wasn’t a government production, still carried “a strong whiff of federal intrusion into local schooling.”
Objectively, Republicans have a good point. Where does the line between help and intrusion lie?
Rather than adding to an intelligent debate on improving education, Florida Rep. Charles Van Zant, R-Keystone Heights, is making headlines for claiming that Common Core will make Florida youth turn gay.
During a speech in an Orlando “Operation Education Conference,” Zant said that those implementing Common Core are “promoting as hard as they can any youth that is interested in the LGBT agenda,” and that they want to “attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.”
Ah, the old “gay agenda” argument. Not to speak on behalf of all LGBT people, but isn’t the only thing on the “gay agenda,” like, equal rights? And an end to discrimination and homophobic/transphobic bullying and assault? And a second season of “Looking”?
Zant, unsurprisingly, has been caught in preposterous lies before. According to PolitiFact Florida, in 2013, while advocating for the criminalization of abortion based on the race or sex of the fetus, Zant claimed, “Abortionists have reduced our black population by more than 25 percent since 1973.”
PolitiFact deemed that “wildly incorrect.”
Zant’s statements about Common Core are, additionally, wildly incorrect.
In order to understand the reasoning behind Common Core, one must be aware of the context. No other nation in the world, Diane Ravitch told the Washington Post, has “inflicted so many changes or imposed so many mandates on its teachers and public schools as we have in the past dozen years.”
Ravitch, an education historian who has become the leader of the movement against corporate-influenced school reform, went on to point out that both Republican and Democratic agendas surrounding education reform have nothing to do with improving education or creating equal opportunity for students. Instead, she argues, both parties want to cut costs, standardize education and shift delivery of education from high-cost teachers to low-cost technology. Common Core was caught in the center of the desire to standardize and gut American education. Rather than fixing the public education problem, it only added to the sense that American education is just a standardized test-based meritocracy.
Common Core has its problems, yes. But Florida needs more than a hate-speech-spewing bigot when it comes to repairing public education and finding a solution.
And please: Enough with “the gay agenda.”
[A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 5/20/2014 under the headline "Common Core part of the gay agenda?"]
