[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 34 (Friday, February 27, 2015)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E270-E271]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 EDUCATION WEEK SPOTLIGHT: THE COMMON-CORE STANDARDS' UNDEMOCRATIC PUSH

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. MIMI WALTERS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, February 27, 2015

  Mrs. MIMI WALTERS of California. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following 
article by Williamson M. Evers, published online on January 13, 2015.

       One of the most influential books in social science in the 
     last 50 years is economist Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, 
     and Loyalty.
       In this pivotal 1970 book, Hirschman discusses how 
     individuals react when services they rely on deteriorate. The 
     basic responses available to us are ``exit'' and ``voice,'' 
     Hirschman points out, where exit means turning to a different 
     provider or leaving the area, and voice means political 
     participation.
       We tend to think of these responses as stark alternatives. 
     Hirschman, as a social scientist, wanted us to consider the 
     interplay between them.
       Exit usually has lower costs than voice for the individual. 
     With exit, you can avoid the long slog of politics and simply 
     turn to someone else or move somewhere else.
       But there is a limiting case: Exit can have high costs when 
     individuals are loyal to institutions--thus the third 
     component in Hirschman's trio of exit, voice, and loyalty.
       In the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United 
     States, he found Americans intensely loyal to their local 
     schools. Americans saw schools as extensions of their 
     families and neighborhoods. They viewed public schools as 
     akin to voluntarily supported charities and as part of what 
     social scientists today call civil society.
       Tocqueville described township school committees that were 
     deeply rooted in their local communities. State control of 
     local public education took the form of an annual report sent 
     by the township committee to the state capital. There was no 
     national control.
       Today, Americans retain much of the sentiment about local 
     schools they had in Tocqueville's day. But, increasingly, 
     parents and taxpayers view the public schools as an 
     unresponsive bureaucracy carrying out edicts from distant 
     capitals. Today, we are dealing with a deteriorating 
     situation in a declining institution, namely widespread 
     ineffective instruction in the public schools.
       The Common Core State Standards have come to the fore 
     precisely at a time when civically active individuals care 
     much more than they usually do about exit, voice, and 
     loyalty. But the common core has denied voice and tried to 
     block exit.
       The common core's designers have taken the existing 
     bureaucracy and increased its centralization and uniformity. 
     By creating the common-core content standards behind closed 
     doors, the authors increased the alienation of the public 
     from schools as institutions worthy of loyalty. The general 
     public had no voice in creating or adopting the common core.
       The other approach in times of a deteriorating public 
     service is offering better exit options. But the common 
     core's proponents have created an almost inescapable national 
     cartel.
       There has long been a monopoly problem in public education, 
     which was why economist Milton Friedman called for 
     opportunity scholarships (also known as vouchers) to create a 
     powerful exit option. But even in the absence of opportunity 
     scholarships and charter schools, we had some exit options in 
     the past because of competitive federalism, meaning 
     horizontal competition among jurisdictions.
       Economist Caroline Hoxby studied metropolitan areas with 
     many school districts (like Boston) and metropolitan areas 
     contained within one large district (like Miami or Los 
     Angeles). She found that student performance is better in 
     areas with competing multiple districts, where parents at the 
     same income level can move to another locality, in search of 
     a better education.
       We have also seen competitive federalism work in education 
     at the interstate level. Back in the 1950s, education in 
     Mississippi and North Carolina performed at the same low 
     level. North Carolina tried a number of educational 
     experiments and moved ahead of Mississippi. Likewise, 
     Massachusetts moved up over the years from mediocre to 
     stellar.
       The common core's promoters are endeavoring to suppress 
     competitive federalism. The common core's rules and its 
     curriculum guidance are the governing rules of a cartel. The 
     common core's promoters and their federal facilitators wanted 
     a cartel that would override competitive federalism and shut 
     down the curriculum alternatives that federalism would allow.
       The new common-core-aligned tests, whose development was 
     supported with federal funds, function to police the cartel. 
     All long-lasting cartels must have a mechanism for policing 
     and punishing those seen as shirkers and chiselers, or, in 
     other words, those who want to escape the cartel's strictures 
     or who want increased flexibility so they can succeed.
       The new leadership of the College Board by David Coleman, 
     one of the common core's chief architects, is being used to 
     corral Catholic schools, other private schools, and home-
     schooling parents into the cartel. The proponents of the 
     common core have now established a clearinghouse for 
     authorized teaching materials to try to close off any 
     remaining possible avenue of escaping the cartel.
       What was the rationale for the common core? The name given 
     to the Obama administration's signature school reform effort, 
     the Race to the Top program, promotes the idea that the 
     federal government needs to step in and lead a race. Central 
     to this rhetoric is the idea that state performance standards 
     were already on a downward slide and that, without 
     nationalization, standards would inexorably continue on a 
     ``race to the bottom.''
       I would disagree. While providers of public education 
     certainly face the temptation to do what might look like 
     taking the easy way out by letting academic standards 
     decline, there is also countervailing pressure in the 
     direction of higher standards.
       If state policymakers and education officials let content 
     standards slip, low standards will damage a state's 
     reputation for having a trained workforce. Such a drop in 
     standards will even damage the policymakers' own reputations.
       In 2007, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute looked empirically 
     at state performance standards over time in a study called 
     ``The Proficiency Illusion.'' The study showed that, while 
     states had a variety of performance standards (as would be 
     expected in a federal system), the supposed ``race to the 
     bottom'' was not happening. The proponents of the common core 
     are wrong in their claims that state performance standards 
     were inevitably on a downward slide.

[[Page E271]]

       The common core, in fact, provided relief from competitive 
     pressure from other states. Sonny Perdue, the governor of 
     Georgia at the time that the common core was created (the 
     initiative was launched in 2009, and the standards were 
     released in 2010), did not like it when the low-performing 
     students of his state were compared with students in other 
     states with standards different from Georgia's. He became the 
     lead governor in bringing the National Governors Association 
     into the national standards effort.
       Nationalizing standards and tests eliminated them as 
     differentiated school reform instruments that could be used 
     by states in competition over educational attainment among 
     the states.
       The common core undermines citizens' exit option and 
     competitive federalism. It was designed to do so. It likewise 
     evades and negates the voice option. But the makers of this 
     malign utopia have forgotten a few things.
       They forgot that the desire for a voice, the desire for 
     political action, can become particularly intense when people 
     are faced with the prospect of nowhere to exit to. They 
     forgot that hemming in parents and teachers would create a 
     demand for alternatives and escape routes. Alternatives to 
     the national common-core-aligned tests have arisen. States 
     are dropping these national tests. States are also struggling 
     to escape the common-core cartel itself. Parents are opting 
     out of common-core testing.
       By trying to block exit and voice, the designers and 
     proponents of the Common Core State Standards have caused 
     blowback: A large parent-, teacher-, and community-based 
     movement has arisen to oppose the common core and its 
     national tests.

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