William J. Bennett, Reagan’s education secretary, makes The Conservative Case for Common Core in the Wall Street Journal.
. . . public schools should have high standards based on a core curriculum that is aligned with tests that are comparable across state lines. The U.S. has several types of national exams that assume at least some common basis of knowledge and understanding. These exams—NAEP, AP, SAT and ACT—work and most of the country agrees that they are useful.
“The standards do not prescribe what is taught in our classrooms or how it’s taught,” argues Bennett.
“The Common Core was meant from the get-go to replace state and local autonomy with national control,” responds Peter Wood on Minding the Campus. “Of course, if you like the federal educrats running the curriculum with the aid of a couple of privately held testing consortia and the enthusiastic support of some textbook mega-publishers, the Common Core may be your thing.” But don’t call it “conservative.”