What’s Up With Arne Duncan Dissing White Suburban Moms?

If Secretary of Education Arne Duncan really wants to support and defend the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS), he might consider foregoing anymore public statements.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of state schools superintendents Friday that he found it “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

Because dissing on moms who are actively involved in their children’s education is always a winning move, right? For something which is not officially a Federal initiative (as the Federal Department of Education is legally prohibited from creating educational standards), Duncan spends an inordinate amount of time defending CCSS. Much of that defense is of this same type: avoiding serious criticism of the standards by labeling opponents as politically-driven fringe groups (or, in this case, silly women.)

At a Sept. 30 appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, he said that opposition to the Core standards had been fueled by “political silliness.” In June, he told a convention of newspaper editors that Core critics were misinformed at best and laboring under paranoid delusions at worst. Duncan said:

The Common Core has become a rallying cry for fringe groups that claim it is a scheme for the federal government to usurp state and local control of what students learn. An op-ed in the New York Times called the Common Core “a radical curriculum.” It is neither radical nor a curriculum. … When the critics can’t persuade you that the Common Core is a curriculum, they make even more outlandish claims. They say that the Common Core calls for federal collection of student data. For the record, it doesn’t, we’re not allowed to, and we won’t. And let’s not even get into the really wacky stuff: mind control, robots, and biometric brain mapping.

As in every aspect of American life, there are of course fringe groups with varying reasons, sane and not-so much, for opposing CCSS. But for Duncan to paint all opposition with this brush is both dishonest and manipulative. More importantly, it seems an altogether ineffective means of deflecting criticism.

As students begin to take new Core-aligned standardized tests (designed with a $350 million Federal grant), the percentage of students scoring in the proficient range is tanking. Witness New York, which has been on the forefront of adoption, and where a mere 30% of students tested proficient. This is understandably causing alarm. Duncan’s response is that, hey, your kids weren’t really that great to begin with.

This probably appeals on some level to those who enjoy a good jab at suburban mothers. But on what basis can Duncan judge that those kids really are worse-performing than previously thought? On the basis of a brand-new test tied to a set of untested standards which draw a great deal of very legitimate criticism from educators and child development experts — not just suburban moms.

For those who don’t follow education policy and are unaware of the debate, the idea of common standards of achievement to ensure U.S. students are college and career-prepared and able to compete globally sounds spiffy. Heck, why not? Surely those wackos on the right will complain about loss of state and local control… but hey, that local control is why some kids are being taught that evolution and creationism are competing scientific theories, right?

And that’s the thing. If proponents of CCSS can paint all opposition as political silliness from uninformed fringe groups, they can avoid any closer look at the real issues. A few of the those issues (please see Anthony Cody’s excellent in-depth write-up for more):

• Common Core standards are designed to increase, not decrease, the amount of standardized testing already taking place, with students as young as kindergarten sitting for high-stakes tests
• Common Core standards are inflexible, assigning levels of achievement strictly by grade-level, meaning that students can be labeled as ‘behind’ at very early ages, limiting their educational opportunities
• Common Core was developed without the involvement of a single child development expert, and as such, ignores what we know about the varying rates at which different children develop
• Common Core has no research to support it and has never been tested
• There are troubling ties between Common Core and an effort to track student data throughout their school careers and into their working lives, without parental consent
• Common Core is a give-away to testing companies, and over-emphasizes the use of technology to boost learning (witness the LA Unified school district spending over a billion dollars to put an iPad in every student’s hands)
• Above all, Common Core was developed in a highly secretive manner and has been nearly forced on states

And those are just the highlights, folks. This program is being shoved on students and educators; and while it may have been created with the best of intentions, that does not make it impervious to criticism or questions. But instead of a genuine dialog debating the merits of the standards, or any consideration of adjustment, the public is subjected to hard-core lobbying by big business and opponents are ridiculed by the U.S. Secretary of Education. (A man with no actual background in education, by the way.)

Why? Because the criticism is growing, and will surely grow as more states implement and test based on CCSS. Just as painting opposition to the corporate charter school movement as coming only from disgruntled teachers’ unions has failed to bolster the popularity of that movement, we’re starting to see that condescendingly dismissing CCSS critics is likewise ineffective at silencing opposition. If anything, Duncan’s high-profile comments on Friday are doing little to prop up his pet project.

By: Sandi Behrns

Sandi Behrns is a noted policy nerd, new media & web developer, and consultant to progressive organizations and campaigns. She is a senior contributor to Liberaland, and the Executive Editor of Progressive Congress News.