Guest Editorial
BY TOM TOTH | MAY 28, 2014
Common Core in the classroom another one size fits all cluster
Barack Obama is a dreamer, but he's not the only one.
The supporters of Common Core standards, Obamacare, and socialist economic policies seem to have fallen hopelessly in love with the ideas behind these policies.
Because the left can't quite seem to wrap their collectivist minds around the fact that good public policy goes far above and beyond dreams and happy thoughts, we're stuck with national public policy embarrassments like Common Core tests and Healthcare.gov.
Public policy theory is fiction. Implementation and consequences are reality.
Insuring each and every American by force, raising student education results by applying federal standards, simulating the economy by arbitrarily dumping over a trillion dollars into state government jobs and union contracts, or forcing banks to lend to buyers incapable of making the payments without negative repercussions.
Millions of health insurance policy cancellations, embarrassingly nonsensical Common Core test questions, stagnant record high unemployment, little or no growth in the economy, or the crash of the housing market.
These consequences, intended or otherwise, are the reality that lawmakers and citizens alike must live with because bad policy and poor analyses coupled with flawed foundational principles have resulted in predictably poor results.
It's not dissimilar to the idea of destroying producers and equalizing every person by stealing from those with excess and distributing to those with less, therefore eliminating poverty creating an egalitarian utopia — the dream sequences of academics for over a hundred years. But the pesky practice of Marxism in the Soviet Union and Red China did nothing but create the most murderous dictatorships of the modern era and brought the world to the brink of a worldwide nuclear war.
The idea of education reform is to better education so that students learn. The function of Common Core is that all students meet a basic level of measurable academic achievement that can be monitored in Washington D.C. This function was a response to Washington's conclusion that, well, we really don't know how bad the state of education is, state to state. However, its implementation looks like this:
"Public education is down at the moment…"
One need not pass a bill to see what is in it. However for the happy, utopian dreamer, the critical analysis of poor, well-intentioned ideas proves more difficult than rolling the dice and hoping for dreams come true.
But the more likely outcome, and the reality Americans living after the Obama administration now face, are math problems like this, a formerly imperfect healthcare system now on the road to complete collapse, and an entire economy stubbornly incapable of growth and innovation necessary for the 21st century to be another American century.
Top-down government solutions fail to do the trick.
Those with bloated power — and matching egos — always assume that they are the ones who must solve the problems of the feckless masses.
One size does not fit all when solving problems that face hundreds of millions of people. People's lives are complex, messy, and unique. Each student learns in a unique way, with God-given abilities is unique areas.
Tom Toth is the social media director of Americans for Limited Government.
