In The Education Invasion, Joy Pullmann blows the lid off Common Core's cloak-and-dagger origin and its far-reaching tentacles in her copiously annotated, well-written book. She defines Common Core as "a 640-page set of blueprints for K-12 math and English curriculum and tests," and shows how it's a major shift even from the No Child Left Behind Act, which required standardized tests in math and reading but left it to the states to formulate them. "Common Core goes further," Pullmann writes: "It specifies what a set of unelected committees thought every child should ‘know and be able to do' at each grade level." Common Core fails to teach traditional knowledge and instead fosters the notion of a "living work," which means the standards can change at the whim of current cultural trends. As Pullmann notes: "It serves up cumbersome process requirements wrapped in obscure jargon."

In day-to-day classroom instruction, this means students no longer read and digest classical literature, but instead are given so-called "informational texts" in a piecemeal fashion. Pullmann uses as an example the fact that an appendix to the standards "does mention elements of cultural knowledge that are central to a classical education, but it mangles them. For example, it selectively quotes the Bill of Rights, and then recommends blatantly biased secondary materials to interpret it as a racist, sexist document." She adds that many of the fiction books on Common Core's recommended reading list contain disturbing themes and graphic depictions of sex, pedophilia, violence, and rape.

As for Common Core math, fuzzy does not begin to describe it. While math fads have come and gone, and Education Reporter has covered them all, the Common Core math standards have provoked the single greatest pushback among parents and teachers because they require cumbersome and confusing processes instead of simple, proven arithmetic.

The Education Invasion makes it obvious that the object of Common Core is not to educate children, but to put them through a long and painful process that ends with their learning next to nothing of real cultural or practical value. Teachers must "teach to the tests," a practice Phyllis Schlafly often warned about, and legions of children have struggled with the sheer number of tests that are required.

How did we get here? The author describes the invention of Common Core as "nationalizing education under the radar." The biggest myth about the project is that it was "state-led," because nothing could be further from the truth. Due to the fact that Americans have consistently opposed federal control over education and the U.S. Constitution grants it no such power, "Common Core's originators ran it through a series of private nonprofit organizations, trying at the same time to make it appear ‘state-led.'"

Although Bill Gates and his foundation funded almost the entire project, Pullmann writes that the concept was actually born in "the nationalization strategy a Brookings Institution paper recommended in 2000." This paper "suggested a backdoor approach: nonprofit organizations could assert a national interest in education without having to defend themselves against the charge of wanting to become a national school board."

Common Core had two chief architects: David Coleman and Gene Wilhoit; the latter served as president of the private networking and lobbying organization called the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) while, as Pullmann describes, "it midwifed Common Core." Coleman and Wilhoit approached Gates in 2008, and his foundation provided an initial $10 million grant to bankroll the project.

Since 2009, writes Pullmann, "The Gates Foundation has given millions to state and federal departments of education for Common Core, and to national teachers unions. It has spent hundreds of thousands to assist state education agencies in tying teacher evaluations to Common Core. It has spent millions to sponsor forums where advocacy groups lobbied governors, state school board members and lawmakers, local school board members, business leaders, teachers, and other key groups in promoting Common Core. It created a shadow bureaucracy to promote and implement the project." Despite all this, most parents and members of the general public initially remained unaware of Common Core.

Although her book was originally published in 2017, Pullmann's anecdotes about parents being denied their First Amendment right to speak out in public forums are eerily predictive of the situation facing parents today. The reader can clearly see the connection between Common Core standards and everything parents are complaining about in 2021.

For example, the author relates how a concerned dad in Baltimore was arrested "after standing up at an informational public meeting attended by the state superintendent, to complain that Common Core had dumbed down his kids' instruction." Pullmann recounts how, speaking in a calm voice, this parent asserted that "the goal of the Common Core standards is not to prepare kids for full-fledged universities, it's to prepare them for community college." Pullmann confirms the accuracy of this observation, writing: "That is the plain truth, as one of Common Core's lead writers acknowledged in public testimony."

Pullmann describes how, as the audience applauded, the parent raised his voice a little and continued to speak, but meeting officials demanded he ask a question. When he failed to do so but continued to "calmly but emphatically" voice his concerns, he was forcibly removed by a security guard. "He was arrested and charged with second-degree assault of a police officer and disrupting a school function," Pullmann writes, adding: "The video of the incident netted a million views on YouTube — and then the charges were dropped."

Similarly, a New Hampshire father was arrested after going over his allotted two minutes while complaining to his local school board about his daughter's sexually graphic literature assignments, which came from the recommended list in the Common Core standards' appendix. This too was caught on video and posted on YouTube. Pullmann writes that the parent's voice was agitated, and he interrupted a school board member who talked over him and tried to shut him down, but he didn't shout or even stand up or show any physical aggression. He just expressed his annoyance in an annoyed tone, and then he got arrested."

As Pullmann notes, these scattered arrests for constitutionally protected speech, "combined with other tactics of crowd control and intimidation, underscore that Common Core has been imposed upon an unwilling citizenry... Common Core is soft coercion, occasionally reinforced by harder coercion." When parents began to discover the radical changes taking place in their children's classrooms, they pushed back, voicing their concerns to state lawmakers and boards of education. A groundswell of opposition to Common Core arose, and movements to repeal the standards blossomed in many states.

Indiana was the first to move against Common Core, with the legislature voting in 2013 to suspend implementation for a year "and submit it to a review and revision." But Pullmann writes that then-Governor Pence's "first mistake was delegating the revision to career education bureaucrats instead of teachers and college-level content experts."

Ultimately, the hands steering the wheel to replace Common Core in Indiana belonged to the same types of people who wrote it and/or openly supported it. After a series of machinations and back-and-forth bickering, the new standards, which were essentially the same standards parents had been fighting to replace, were approved with Governor Pence's blessing.

Indiana's battle was repeated to varying degrees in at least 23 states in 2014. Some, such as Arizona, merely renamed the standards. Others, like Florida, went through the motions entirely for show, although Florida did remove "some appendices to Common Core that were already optional." Just four states passed bills to outlaw Common Core: Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. None succeeded in making substantive reforms.

Since Common Core's implementation, many good teachers have resigned once they realized they were no longer in control of their classrooms and were increasingly burdened by federal regulations. Many parents have sought alternatives in homeschooling, charter schools, and private educational options. But Common has also infiltrated some charter schools, private schools, and parochial schools. Along with the many true stories and testimonies of teachers, parents, and other opponents of Common Core throughout her book, Pullmann describes the experience of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles President, Ed Martin, who discovered some years ago that his children's Catholic school had been invaded by Common Core. Martin eventually transferred them to a classical school, which Pullmann quotes him as saying was "intellectually and pedagogically safe, not just physically safe, and that changed our lives."

Pullmann acknowledges that Common Core "surprised a lot of people when it began popping up in their children's schools," but says we shouldn't have been surprised, despite the fact that its creators and supporters deliberately imposed it by stealth means. "It's just the next logical step in America's century-long progression toward a nationalized education system."

She concludes by noting: "Common Core maintains its hold on our children only if we let it. The question is how much it matters to [us]."

The Education Reporter Book Review is a project of America’s Future, Inc. To find out more about America’s Future, visit AmericasFuture.net.

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