Anonymous wrote:

As you've said already 60 times without ever providing any supporting evidence other than your opinion.

It is an opinion based on years of experience. What is your opinion based upon?

Anonymous wrote:

You're splitting hairs. All is 100%. How much is a "big component"? Is that 80%? It must be more than 50% or it wouldn't be "big". You always ask for substance. Define what you believe. Substantiate YOUR opinions.

Nevertheless, the issues put forth on this thread by those against CC, have not been political. There may have been a couple of trolls, but most of the issues appear to be posted by people who are sincere in their beliefs. There have been frequent responses to those posts that accuse the posters of being political.

As you've said already 60 times without ever providing any supporting evidence other than your opinion.

You're splitting hairs. All is 100%. How much is a "big component"? Is that 80%? It must be more than 50% or it wouldn't be "big". You always ask for substance. Define what you believe. Substantiate YOUR opinions.

Anonymous wrote:

Nope, nobody ever said "all" the opposition is political. It was said that there is a big political component to it. Not the same thing as saying "all" was political.

You're splitting hairs. All is 100%. How much is a "big component"? Is that 80%? It must be more than 50% or it wouldn't be "big". You always ask for substance. Define what you believe. Substantiate YOUR opinions.

Nope, nobody ever said "all" the opposition is political. It was said that there is a big political component to it. Not the same thing as saying "all" was political.

Anonymous wrote:

Nobody has said that all opposition to the Common Core standards is political. What people have said is that some of the opposition to the Common Core standards is political. Which is a fact.

There have been posts on here that have said that all the opposition is political--despite the rational posts.

Anonymous wrote:The really sad part is that Common Core is not going to help those underachievers that it was designed to help. Education is a building process. You have to lay a foundation first. Problem is that the Common Core standards want the kids on the ladder before there is a strong foundation to support it.

After all, today’s school reform agenda was crafted with the troubles of the inner-city in mind. It focuses on ensuring that low-income and minority children who had been “left behind” would master essential skills and graduate high school. The overriding mission has been to take dysfunctional schools and make them functional. The goal is admirable. However, the diagnosis and remedies are configured for a particular set of schools and students.

They’ve chalked the situation up to the imaginings of conspiracy theorists, the ravings of malcontents, parental ignorance and teacher union machinations. This all sounds familiar. It was the same reaction that greeted initial concerns about the Common Core or, more than a decade ago, those raised about No Child Left Behind. In fact, this familiar diagnosis may tell us less about opt-out than it does about the myopic nature of contemporary education reform. By and large, education reformers have seemingly concluded that it’s fine to ignore or alienate middle-class families.

After all, today’s school reform agenda was crafted with the troubles of the inner-city in mind. It focuses on ensuring that low-income and minority children who had been “left behind” would master essential skills and graduate high school. The overriding mission has been to take dysfunctional schools and make them functional. The goal is admirable. However, the diagnosis and remedies are configured for a particular set of schools and students.

It turns out that many suburban and middle-class parents have issues when those reforms are extended to the schools that educate their children. This has been taken as a sign that these parents are ignorant or selfish. As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has put it, “Pushback is coming from, sort of, 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, and that’s pretty scary.”

[READ: Teachers Need a Raise]

Reformers see parental skepticism as irrational. The fact that 70 percent of the nation’s parents consistently give their child’s school an A or a B simply shows how blind they are. The fact that 68 percent of parents don’t believe standardized tests help teachers teach or that just 31 percent think it’s a good idea to use test results to evaluate teachers serves only to underscore their ignorance.

But there’s another possibility. It’s that these parents are being reasonable when they worry that the reform agenda, whatever its merits when it comes to schools steeped in dysfunction, does more harm than good for their kids. Reformers have tended to dismiss this possibility, while seeking to convince middle-class parents that their schools are much worse than they may realize.

Oddly enough, suburban parents seem oddly ungrateful for these efforts to help them see that their children’s schools actually stink. When reformers wonder why these parents don’t get it, the usual culprit is “messaging.” And the usual solution is better PR.

But maybe the parents do get it. Maybe they figure that having their child sit for a dozen hours of testing, as part of an effort that seems to be narrowing their school’s curriculum, doesn’t add a lot of value. Maybe these parents aren’t convinced that the results of these tests will be used in ways that benefit their kids. Using those test results to identify “effective” teachers so that these teachers can be more “equitably” distributed (e.g. moved from middle-class schools to low-income schools) sure doesn’t seem designed to help middle-class kids. It’s no great wonder that middle-class families can regard the reform agenda as hostile, when it doesn’t feel irrelevant.

[READ: What's In a Terrible Name?]

Maybe the solution is not to berate these parents, but to ask what they want for their children, find ways to help make that happen and seek opportunities to promote reform that benefits a broad coalition of low-income and middle-class families. Here are three simple ideas to start.

State officials can be vastly more transparent about whether and how state tests results are used to improve the education of all children. This would include a much more aggressive effort to solicit parental concerns about test length and content, take those concerns seriously and address them.

Those designing accountability systems and teacher evaluation should champion a vision of school excellence that stretches beyond reading and math scores. Amid the focus on reading and math scores, much of what parents want for their children can get lost. Reformers would do well to celebrate a vision of excellence that more consciously includes the arts, world languages, citizenship and history.

Reformers should spend less time scheming how to redistribute good teachers and more on growing the number of great teachers. Today, there are extensive efforts to recruit teachers into impoverished schools but almost none in recruiting promising teachers who want to teach in other environs. It’s not an either-or. We can recruit both the missionaries and those who just want to teach calculus.

Historically, in the American system, the social reforms that last have been those that also serve the broad middle class. The nation has tended to be far less generous with reforms that pit the middle class against the poor. Today’s school reformers have been slow to learn this lesson, and have suffered for it. Opt-out offers a chance to start getting this right.

“The one thing upper-middle-class parents want and have grown accustomed to having is the ability to control their kids’ education,” Jay Greene, an education reform scholar who teaches at the University of Arkansas, told me by phone this week. “They will purchase private school if they have to. They will move to another neighborhood if they must. And they will boycott testing if they feel their control is being interfered with.”

A national poll released by Fairleigh Dickinson University earlier this year put approval for the new standards at 17%, against 40% who disapproved and another 42% who were undecided. A breakdown by gender had Common Core support at 22% for men and only 12% for women.

Wealthier parents tend to be the most skeptical, and they are not satisfied with merely sounding off to pollsters. This year hundreds of thousands of students across the country are boycotting Common Core-aligned state exams, and this so-called opt-out movement has been growing. Preliminary estimates are that between 150,000 and 200,000 students skipped New York state’s mandatory English exams last month, up from the 49,000 in 2014.

The Obama administration is aware of these developments, though you might question how it has chosen to respond to critics. “It’s fascinating to me,” said Mr. Duncan in 2013, “that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, 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.”

More recently, the administration has pivoted from insulting parents to threatening them. Mr. Duncan told an education conference in April that if the boycott numbers continue to rise, “then we have an obligation to step in.”

His spokesman later informed reporters that the administration is considering whether to withhold federal funding for districts with test-participation rates below 95%. Given that there is no political will or effective mechanism for punishing test opponents without turning them into martyrs, this is an idle threat. The districts doing most of the boycotting are affluent and not dependent on federal money, which in any case parents could easily replace out of pocket.

Nor is this backlash as “fascinating” as Mr. Duncan claims. For the purposes of opposing accountability measures in No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal education law signed by George W. Bush, the Obama administration told these white suburban moms that their schools were just fine. For the purposes of imposing Common Core, Mr. Duncan is telling them the opposite.

No Child Left Behind had its shortcomings, but Congress went to great lengths to preserve local control. The law’s objective was to produce information—disaggregated data on the racial, ethnic and income groups that were struggling academically. Unlike the Common Core standards and tests, No Child Left Behind didn’t tell schools what to do and what not to do. States were still in charge of determining what to teach and how to teach it.

“The one thing upper-middle-class parents want and have grown accustomed to having is the ability to control their kids’ education,” Jay Greene, an education reform scholar who teaches at the University of Arkansas, told me by phone this week. “They will purchase private school if they have to. They will move to another neighborhood if they must. And they will boycott testing if they feel their control is being interfered with.”

Forty-five states initially signed on to Common Core in return for more federal education funding, but the tide is turning and opponents—including teachers unions who don’t want student test scores, or any other objective measures, used to evaluate instructors—have the momentum. California and Utah already allow parents to opt out of assessments, and CBS News reported in March that 19 other states “have introduced legislation to either halt or replace Common Core.”

This issue won’t go away when students head home for summer vacation next month. The presidential candidates will have to declare themselves. Labor will pressure Hillary Clinton to at least hedge any support for testing, and it is increasingly difficult to imagine a Republican nominee who hasn’t distanced himself from Common Core.

Prof. Greene thinks the administration’s education agenda has crossed the wrong voters. “They’re going to lose,” he said, citing White House hubris and overreach. “You can’t beat organized upper-middle-class people. They will fight back and you will lose.”

Whether one wants to admit it's politically motivated or not, it's evident that the anti-CCers aren't out there calling out all of the disinformation that definitely is politically motivated that's coming from within their own ranks regardless of "what aisle." That ends up hurting anti-CC credibility.