I don’t have a lot of time to go over this article by an inexperienced policy wonk from South Carolina Policy Center (SCPC), Dillon Jones, that was published at The Daily Caller:

Why is a Franklin Ctr/Cato Institute Newbie Policy Wonk talking down to #CommonCore Opposition? http://t.co/zO5lNPEQwB #stopcommoncore

— LL1885 – A.P. Dillon (@LadyLiberty1885) April 16, 2014

So here’s the thing, the entire article can be summed up as, ‘Don’t blame the government for states taking the money that now binds them to Common Core’. Why not just write, “ya’ll need to shut up’? Would have been faster.

In the most simplistic terms, yeah, the states did take the money. In the grand scheme though, taking the money had all sorts of moving parts, waivers and requirements attached.  It was like dangling a carrot in front of a starving rabbit.

I’ll refer Mr. Jones to an article by Neil McCluskey of Cato Institute, which oddly enough has given funding to SCPC.  Quick excerpt, read the whole thing:

For far too long a big part of the Common Core debate has been about establishing simple fact: the federal government provided serious coercion to get states to adopt the Core, and the Core’s creators asked for such arm twisting. Indeed, just yesterday, Andy Smarick at the Core-supporting Thomas B. Fordham Institute lamented that the write-up for President Obama’s education budget proposal gives the administration credit for widespread Core adoption. Wrote Smarick: “The anti-Common Core forces will likely use this language as evidence that Common Core was federally driven.” Of course it was federally driven, by Race to the Top (RTTT) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers! But the budget proposal tells us far more than that.

The big story in the proposal is – or, at least, should be – that the president almost certainly wants to make the Core permanent by attaching annual federal funding to its use, and to performance on related tests. Just as the administration called for in its 2010 NCLBreauthorization proposal, POTUS wants to employ more than a one-time program, or temporary waivers, to impose “college and career-ready standards,” which–thanks to RTTT and waivers–is essentially synonymous with Common Core. In fact, President Obama proposes changing Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act – of which NCLB is just the most recent reauthorization – to a program called “College- and Career-Ready Students,” with an annual appropriation of over $14 billion.