The failure of Obama control freak education policies

Maggie Gallagher:

Sarah Palin was the first to recognize the problem: By participating in President Obama's signature education initiative, the Common Core Standards, Alaska would lose control over its own curriculum.

On May 31, 2009, then-Gov. Palin announced Alaska would adopt a "watch and wait" attitude:

"If this initiative produces useful results, Alaska will remain free to incorporate them," Gov. Palin said, adding that "high expectations are not always created by new, mandated federal standards written on paper. They are created in the home, the community and the classroom."

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, to his credit, was the next to recognize a federal boondoggle when he saw one: "I will not commit Texas taxpayers to unfunded federal obligations or to the adoption of unproven, cost-prohibitive national standards and tests," Gov. Perry wrote in a Jan. 13, 2010, letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

In the ensuing two years, it's become clear that Perry and Palin -- two core conservative figures whose intelligence is routinely mocked by liberal "sophisticates" -- were brilliantly prescient, indeed prophetic.

Common Core Standards turn out to be like Obamacare -- you don't really know what's in it until after you pass it and are mired in its tentacles.

Today, even more states are waking up to discover that they have lost control of both curriculum and costs for a program that is untested and unlikely to improve student performance. A February study by the Pioneer Institute conservatively estimates that Obama's Common Core Standards will costs the states at least $16 billion -- money that could be used to promote education in other ways (pioneerinstitute.org/pdf/120222_CCSSICost.pdf).

This past week, Education Week's blog published a review of criticism for Obama's Common Core initiative. The shocking thing is how many liberals are now acknowledging Common Core comes at a high cost for little or no return. Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, for example, wrote, "(T)he most reasonable prediction is that the Common Core will have little to no effect on student achievement." Joanne Yatvin, a past president of the National Council on Teachers of English, writes, "Taken together, the standards and the criteria project an aura of arrogance and ignorance in their assumptions about how and why children learn."

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I think you could say that much of Obama's policies have embraced the deadly combination of arrogance and ignorance, from health care to foreign policy.  So it is not surprising that their education policies have not worked and have cost more.  Obama may have the most overrated intellect in the history of he presidency.