I’ve written a lot recently about the untoward tactics being employed by supporters of the Common Core national curriculum standards. I’m afraid little seems to be changing, as illustrated by two new bits of evidence.

The first is a survey in Tennessee by the Core-supporting State Collaborative on Reforming Education. The survey – which has gotten significant coverage across the Volunteer State – supposedly shows that Tennesseans just love the Common Core. As the Knoxville News succinctly put it in its headline, “3 in 4 Tennesseans Favor Common Core Standards.” The article goes on to report that “after hearing a brief description about the standards, about 76 percent of voters support their implementation, with 44 percent ‘strongly’ favoring them.”

Well, that seems like an open-and-shut case for the Common…wait a minute. What was that “description” respondents heard?

Checking out the brief summary SCORE put out about its survey, it appears to be the following (see note 1):

Now, just so everyone taking this survey has the same information, let me tell you some more about these Common Core State Standards. These new standards were developed by states and have been set to internationally competitive levels in English and math. This means that students may be more challenged by the material they study, and the tests they take will measure more advanced concepts and require students to show their work. Knowing this, do you favor or oppose implementing these new Common Core State Standards?

Really? “Just so everyone…has the same information”? Gimme a break.

This is, of course, a classic loaded question designed to get a positive response. How many people are going to oppose “internationally competitive” standards by which children will be “challenged”? Forget that curriculum experts hardly all agree with this assertion. Then, it says that the standards were “developed by states” when, in fact, they were not: the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers are not states. Finally, it completely ignores that the federal government coerced state adoption of the Core – the main concern of the Core’s most vocal opponents – and did so before the final standards had even been published. If you’re going to include highly dubious assertions, and exclude crucial concerns, you might as well just say “the Common Core is terrific, has no down sides, and will be great for your kids. Now, do you favor or oppose terrific standards that will surely help your children?”

Alas, this is not new. It’s a standard, pro-Core question.

In other news, Delaware Governor Jack Markell (D) took to the pages of the Washington Post today to defend the Common Core against a Post report on Tea Party opposition to the Core. Alas, it was a typical defense, based as much on smearing Core opponents, and ignoring crucial federal involvement, as discussing the Core’s merits.

Markell starts with a straw man, citing the Post article as saying that Tea Party people argue that the Common Core was developed by the Feds. No such assertion appears in the article. Markell then suggests that Common Core was controlled by “state leaders” without saying who they were, perhaps because the NGA and CCSSO employees in charge of the effort were not “state leaders.” Moreover, he implies that somehow for standards to be high, and our nation internationally competitive, standards must be national. He offers no meaningful arguments for these things, and ignores the significant empirical evidence against such superficial assumptions.

Perhaps the most egregious – but typical – of his piece’s failings are two. The first is the absence of any mention of Race to the Top or NCLB waivers (not to mention federal funding and selection of national tests) that are the concrete federal actions that utterly justify anyone’s worries about federal control. They are also just the kinds of actions supporters asked for. And the second? Smearing the Tea Party as “fringe” kooks who, it is implied, only peddle myths.

Given what we’re seeing from many Core supporters, that last bit is ironic, isn’t it?

The big catch phrase for those fighting to keep subsidized student loan interest rates at 3.4 percent is “don’t double my rate.” That’s because the rate is set to increase from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1. But if President Obama’s Rose Garden pep rally today is any indication, the phrase should be more like “don’t raise my rate at all.”

The POTUS attacked recently passed legislation in the House–which tracks pretty closely with his own proposal–because, he said, it doesn’t do enough to keep loan rates low. Really? The Smarter Solution for Students Act–which, by the way, is hardly all that smart–would set interest rates for subsidized loans at the 10-year Treasury note plus 2.5 percent. Today, that rate is 2.3 percent. Adding 2.5 to it is 4.8 percent, absolutely not a doubling of 3.4.

Of course, T-bill rates could, and likely will, rise, but the main point is supposed to be to make student loan rates track with normal interest rates rather than have politicians set them arbitrarily. That was certainly the case over the last few years, when student loan rates didn’t plummet along with overall rates. But it seems a tracked rate isn’t really what students and colleges want: they want super-cheap–preferably free–loans, which makes sense (for them). Like normal people, they want money at as little cost to themselves as possible. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, that is what many vote-seeking politicians want to give them, despite the powerful evidence that aid mainly lets colleges raise their prices at breakneck speeds, fuels demand for frills, and abets serious noncompletion. In other words, it likely does more harm than good.

All of this is why Washington should get out of student aid entirely. But for that to happen, regular people will have to make their catch-phrase, “Don’t give them loans at all.”

By a 4-2 margin, the Colorado Supreme Court has rejected a lawsuit claiming that the state’s method of funding public schools is unconstitutional. It overturned a lower court ruling that had held that the current arrangement of funding fails to meet a requirement in the Colorado constitution that the state operate a “thorough and uniform” system of education. [decision in State v. Lobato via KDVR coverage] 

For years, pushing their Lobato case in the court of public opinion, school-spending advocates have been decrying Colorado schools as underfunded. The state has been given a series of bad ratings on education scorecards, many of which turn out on inspection to measure quality by how much money is spent—thus ensuring that Colorado, which spends less than many other states, will come off badly. This one, for example, ranks Colorado at “C-minus” for reasons that include low overall spending, low teacher salaries, and the state’s failure to fund “induction, mentoring or reduced workloads for new teachers.” 

When you measure outputs as opposed to inputs, on the other hand, the state comes off looking far better. In this ranking of SAT scores, Colorado scores 15th among the 50 states, the best performance of any Western state. In this ranking based on 4th and 8th grade testing, Colorado comes in 11th among the 50 states, trailing only Washington among Western states. 

But modern school-finance litigation only poses as being about educational quality. Its deeper mission is control—specifically, transferring control over spending from voters and their representatives to litigators whose loyalty is to a mix of ideologues and interest groups sharing a wish for higher spending. As I wrote in a draft chapter on school finance litigation cut for space from my book Schools for Misrule:

In the forty years since the pioneering Serrano v. California (California Supreme Court, 1971) school finance lawsuits have been filed in nearly every state, courts in around half the states have thrown out existing finance systems as unconstitutional, and many of them have ordered states to raise school budgets, not merely change the way in which they are financed. Vast sums have been redistributed as a result. Lawmakers in Kentucky enacted more than a billion dollars in tax hikes. New Jersey adopted its first income tax. Kansas lawmakers levied an additional $755 million in taxes after the state’s high court in peremptory fashion ordered them to double their spending on schools.

While filed on a state-by-state basis, the suits have been very much a coordinated national project. For many years their impetus came from the Ford Foundation and its various grantees, notably the American Civil Liberties Union. Furnishing, presumably, the brains of the operation, law-school-based groups have been instrumental, particularly the Education Law Center at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey. …

The educational establishment had always resented the periodic need to go hat in hand – such a demeaning phrase! – to local electorates for tax and bond measures, as if the voters were somehow the bosses and they the servants. School finance litigation promised a more indulgent master, a jurist or panel of them who (it was hoped) would glance over the rows of costing-out numbers, nod appreciatively and feel good afterward about having done something for the children. … School finance litigation is the ultimate monument to the triumph of governance by litigation at the cost of democracy itself. 

Despite the victory in Colorado, there’s no reason to think this war of forty years’ duration (so far) is drawing to a close.