Last week the Massachusetts Board of Education approved the adoption of the Common Core Standards in Language and Mathematics, replacing their own standards which had been in place for nearly two decades, and viewed in high regard in the educational world.  Massachusetts’ politicians, educators and professional standard’s managers had spent nearly a year debating whether to adopt the new core standards or not.  They did, and it will no doubt help Massachusetts in its run to capture some of the $4.5 billion of Race to the Top Funds.  So far 29 States and the District of Columbia have overturned their own state standards with the Core Standards which were developed by Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center).

To argue the case in support of the Core Standards, the Board of Education recruited three non-profit organizations, all of which provided positive support for the new Core Standards.  One of the non-profits was Achieve, Inc., a Washington, D.C. based education organization that is deeply entrenched in the development of standards and graduation requirements around the country.  They provide consulting services to State Department’s of Education, and indeed, they were instrumental in writing the Core Standards.  (For science educators, know this: Achieve will write the new generation of science standards that will based on NRC’s Framework for Science).

As you explore the nature of the standards movement as it is happening in the United States, it appears as if non-profits, and professional organizations are at the heart of the development of these standards.  The Federal government’s role in all of this is rather interesting.  Rather than funding universities, which must be accountable, the organizations that are developing the standards receive funding from non-governmental businesses, organizations, and private philanthropic groups.  The groups doing the development, and the funding sources are accountable in this process to no one.

In the Massachusetts case, we get a glimpse into the motivation of a state to adopt the new core standards.  What could the motivation be?  The improvement of the education of students?  The involvement of teachers in improving the nature of classroom teaching practice?  Neither of these.  The motivation is control, and money.  The U.S. Department of Education has a policy that no state can apply for Race to Top Funds unless it adopts core standards, and that the state has no policy against tying teacher performance to student achievement test scores.  This is a powerful strong armed tactic that has 48 or the 50 states adopting these policies.  This kind of central control is leading to a national curriculum engineered by non-profits and private organizations.  And as we know, the U.S. Department of Education insists that if a state wants to apply for Race to the Top Funds, they must abide by these policies.  Indeed, Massachusetts is a governing member of one of the two main consortia applying for federal funding through the Race to the Top competition to design common assessments aligned to the common-core standards.

At the Achieve website, when you click on the “contributor” link, one finds out that the source of funds for this non-profit organization include the following:  The Battelle Foundation • Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation • The Boeing Company • Brookhill Foundation • Carnegie Corp. of New York • The GE Foundation • IBM Corp. • Intel Foundation • JP Morgan Chase Foundation • Lumina • Nationwide • Noyce Foundation • The Prudential Foundation • State Farm Insurance Companies • Washington Mutual Foundation • The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

I find it perplexing that none of the organizations that are developing and underwriting the standards movement are not accountable to anyone, yet these same organizations, the U.S. Department of Education and state Boards of Education around the country require schools, administrators and teachers to be accountable for the standards these organization develop, and the assessment instruments that the same organizations create.  Indeed, a number of states have already decided that a teacher’s salary will be based on achievement of their students.  There is no bailout for the teachers; indeed, in Washington, D.C., several hundred teachers were fired for “poor performance.”  Heads of corporations that lost billions of dollars over the past few years have been rewarded with billions in bailout money, and many have received golden handshakes, even when their performance was a disaster.

We have a problem here.