Common Core Testing: Edublob at the Trough

Proponents of the Common Core standards initiated by the states and adopted by most of them are fond of stating that the federal government isn't imposing its standards on anyone. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The education "establishment," or edublob, is practically salivating at the funds and promises coming out of Washington. Entire school districts and entire states (except Texas!) are trashing their own standards and textbooks in jockeying for position at the OPM trough.The Charleston County School District is a case in point. South Carolina's adoption of Common Core under the aegis of Democrat State Superintendent Jim Rex allowed the district to receive funds to finance its ill-advised teacher evaluation metrics. The edublob gets a big chunk of the money to devise ways in which student results can be calibrated to factors such as poverty (i.e., expecting the children of the poor to learn less!).

The latest sally in controlling content to issue from the U.S. Department of Education is grants to two edublob entities, Smarter Balanced (http://www.smarterbalanced.org/) and PARCC (http://www.parcconline.org/), to use OPM to develop testing appropriate to the Common Core standards. Out go the tests developed over the years that match previous standards.

Do you realize how many millions, if not billions, of OPM are now being thrown into the trash?

Look at the opportunities for earnings: new curriculum and teacher-training sessions for that curriculum; printing all those documents; developing evaluation standards for teachers and students; selling all those new textbooks. . . . Everybody gets his.

You would suppose that at some point they would exhaust their reservoir of OPM, but that will never happen. After all, all they need is to raise taxes.