Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate, is doubling down on Common Core.
On Monday, Bush’s nonprofit Foundation for Excellence in Education declared that “pressing pause” on Common Core “means stopping forward momentum,” and he pushed back against states that are resisting the top-down standards.
As The Wall Street Journal noted, “resistance to Common Core is growing among the party’s activists, who see it as a federal incursion into local schools,” and “Republican governors of South Carolina and Oklahoma last month joined Indiana in opting out.”
In addition to his embrace of Common Core, Bush has also gone all-in on amnesty, which was the primary factor that led to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) shocking primary defeat last week.
Bush allies, lobbyist and former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour among them, believe that Bush’s espousal of amnesty and Common Core will help him in a potential general election because he won’t be perceived as a flip-flopping politician who stands for nothing, as they perceive Mitt Romney.
But resistance to Common Core is becoming more widespread, as those on the right and left are becoming more vocal in their opposition.
Conservative writer Michelle Malkin, who has been at the forefront battling Common Core and sounding the alarm when few others were, said that “all Common Core roads lead to K Street.” Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint told the Journal that Common Core “substitutes an unaccountable federal bureaucracy for state, local, and parental decision-making in education.”
Diane Ravitch, a left-of-center education expert, has also been relentlessly opposing Common Core. Ravitch declared that Common Core standards “are being imposed on the children of this nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers, or schools.”
“For the past two years, I have steadfastly insisted that I was neither for nor against the Common Core standards. I was agnostic,” Ravitch wrote last year. “I wanted to see how they worked in practice. I wanted to know, based on evidence, whether or not they improve education and whether they reduce or increase the achievement gaps among different racial and ethnic groups.” She continued by asserting, “After much deliberation … I have come to the conclusion that the Common Core standards effort is fundamentally flawed by the process with which they have been foisted upon the nation.”