Uh‐​oh: Here Comes Edu‐​Goliath!

The hard‐​nosed, content‐​at‐​all‐​cost folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation have been warned, and warned, and warned some more: Get the national curriculum standards you think are so incredibly important, and they will almost certainly be captured by the pedagogical progressives who have dominated education for decades — and whose notions you disdain. Well, if what’s being reported by Common Core’s Lynne Munson – and reiterated in this lamentation for Massachusetts by the Pioneer Institute’s Jim Stergios — is accurate, that is already happening. (Actually, some prominent analysts have long said that the national standards — created by the Council of Chief State School Officers and National Governors Association — are already nothing the Fordhamites should embrace.) Writes Munson:

This is strange. P21 is being subsumed into CCSSO. There’s nothing to be read about this on either CCSSO’s or P21′s websites. But according to Fritzwire the two organizations have formed a “strategic management relationship” that will commence December 1.

So what is P21 — the group cozying up with the standards‐​writing CCSSO — you ask? Let the Fordham Institute tell you:

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has some powerful supporters, including the NEA, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft. Fourteen states have also climbed aboard its effort to refocus American K‑12 education on global awareness, media literacy and the like – and to defocus it on grammar, multiplication tables and the causes of the Civil War. Its swell‐​sounding yet damaging notions have been plenty influential – but the unmasking and truth‐​telling have begun, thanks in large part to a valiant little organization named Common Core. And new research validates this and other skeptics’ criticisms. Today the contest resembles David vs. Goliath – but remember who ultimately prevailed in that one.

Uh‐​oh. It might be time to end the biblical references — it looks more and more like Goliath is going to win.