Despite blasting federal overreach in education and making other statements sure to delight conservatives and constitutionalists, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos continued to mislead Americans on Common Core last week. Indeed, despite the dumbed-down national standards still being in place in almost every state, DeVos falsely claimed that Common Core was “dead” at the Department of Education.
After going over the history and how the Obama administration bribed state governments to impose Common Core, DeVos noted that education performance did not improve. “Then, rightly, came the public backlash to federally imposed tests and the Common Core,” she said in a speech titled “Bush-Obama School Reform: Lessons Learned” last week. “I agree — and have always agreed — with President Trump on this: ‘Common Core is a disaster.’ And at the U.S. Department of Education, Common Core is dead.”
Except it’s not dead. In fact, like Frankenstein, the Common Core zombie marches onward, eating out the brains of millions of government-school victims — all with help, approval, funding, and support from the federal Leviathan behind the curtain. So, while DeVos’ speech publicly lambasting the havoc unleashed by the feds in education sounded great, it does not come close to reflecting reality.
In the real world, under ESSA, GOP leaders and Congress conspired to give the Education Secretary the power to approve or deny states’ standards — an idea even more unconstitutional than the Department of Education itself. In any case, Common Core standards and minor variations on them are all being rubber-stamped by DeVos’ Education Department, just as Obama and his co-conspirators intended when they created ESSA and purported to mandate “college- and career-ready” standards (read: Common Core).
The secretary’s rhetoric, though, sounded great. For instance, DeVos noted that “two presidents from different political parties and philosophies” took “two different approaches” on education and that both left America’s students “unprepared.” “Perhaps the lesson lies not in what made the approaches different, but in what made them the same: the federal government,” DeVos said. “Both approaches had the same Washington ‘experts’ telling educators how to behave.”
It is not the first time DeVos has made highly misleading statements about the politically toxic national standards. In May, The Newman Report highlighted similar remarks made by the education secretary claiming, falsely, that Common Core was no longer an “issue.” Pointing to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that enshrined Obama’s illegal education schemes into federal statute, she said the measure “essentially does away with the whole argument about Common Core.”
“Each state can set the standards for their state,” DeVos continued, which is only partly true and was completely true before Obama bribed states to impose Common Core using taxpayer money. “They may elect to adopt very high standards for their students to aspire to and work toward. That will be up to each state to be able to ascertain what is right for that state. We hope that all of them will have very high expectations.”
Even if Common Core were ripped out from the roots, the federally controlled government “education” system in America would continue to dumb down and indoctrinate students on an industrial scale—literally threatening the future of the nation. But the fact that DeVos continues to dishonestly try to mislead Americans into believing Common Core is “dead” should alarm everyone. It’s way past time to shut down the whole unconstitutional Education Department.
