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short, the federal government was closely involved in building Common Core, according to the initiative’s founding documents and leaders. To say otherwise is either the result of ignorance or an exercise in deception.

      In 2009, the new Obama administration obliged NGA and CCSSO’s request for a “federal-state partnership” to “leverage” states into Common Core. Congress, in its wisdom, had granted the incoming education secretary a $4.35 billion slush fund in the stimulus bill. Duncan decided to turn that money into the grant competition he called Race to the Top (RTT). To get a slice of that pie, states had to explain how they would spend it. The Education Department judged state proposals according to four main criteria. One of these was that a state had adopted or committed itself to adopt “education standards common to a significant number of states.”

      That definition, then as now, fits only Common Core. Indeed, the final regulations for RTT applications said “a State will earn ‘high’ points if its consortium [curriculum standards group] includes a majority of the States in the country; it will earn ‘medium’ or ‘low’ points if its consortium includes one-half or fewer of the States in the country.”⁹¹ Translation: Want to improve your chances of getting some of this money? Adopt Common Core, sight unseen.

      Or as Joanne Weiss, who ran RTT as Duncan’s chief of staff, put it bluntly in a 2015 paper, “[W]e forced alignment among the top three education leaders in each participating state — the governor, the chief state school officer, and the president of the state board of education — by requiring each of them to sign their state’s Race to the Top application.”⁹² There’s that federal muscle.

      In its 2014 retrospective on how all this happened — published four years after states had locked themselves into the scheme — the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration had actually written the words “Common Core” into its initial RTT grant requirements. But the straightforwardness of this language alarmed Wilhoit. “Those kinds of things cause people to be real suspicious,” he told the Post. So he got Weiss to delete the words “Common Core” in favor of the euphemism “college- and career-ready” standards.⁹³

      States had one other option for fulfilling the “college- and career-ready” criterion. They could have all their higher education institutions certify that the state’s existing standards would graduate students ready for college with no need for remediation, something no high school diploma has ever certified. Doing so would either pull college down to the level of the average high school graduate or raise high school diploma requirements to a level most students would fail to reach. No state chose that option.

      There was little time to do so, anyway. The U.S. Department of Education issued its Race to the Top guidelines on November 19, 2009.⁹⁴ The first deadline for states to return applications — which averaged three hundred pages in length, with an additional two hundred pages of appendices⁹⁵ — was January 19, 2010. The first draft of Common Core would not be released until March. Yet forty states and the District of Columbia submitted applications including pledges to adopt Common Core, whatever it was.⁹⁶ Merely applying for a federal grant functioned, in effect, as a contractual promise.

      The Gates Foundation sent twenty-four states a total of $2.7 million to pay for consultants who helped write these applications,⁹⁷ which may explain why they all looked similar. So much for “competition.” Really, there was one competitor: the Gates Foundation. And it was competing on criteria it helped create. So it isn’t surprising that fourteen of the sixteen RTT-winning states had crafted their applications with the assistance of Gates-funded consultants.

      “The Gates Foundation’s agenda has become the country’s agenda in education,” said Michael Petrilli, vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to the Puget Sound Business Journal in 2009.⁹⁸ Indeed, it has. But again, who elected Gates?

      The second deadline for a shot at RTT money was June 1, 2010.⁹⁹ At least there was a draft of Common Core available by then, but the final edition would not be published until the following day. During this round of applications, thirty-five states and the District of Columbia renewed their promises to adopt Common Core.¹⁰⁰

      These pledges were yet another reason Common Core went into effect years before voters or parents had any idea what was happening. States’ subsequent adoption of Common Core was just a formality. After the mandates were officially published on June 2, it took only thirty-five business days for a majority of states to issue the regulations locking themselves in.¹⁰¹

      Tennessee was one of the first two RTT winners. Its state board of education unanimously rubberstamped Common Core on July 30, 2010, noting in its meeting minutes, “The verbatim adoption of these standards is required for Race to the Top approval.”¹⁰² Connecticut, the other initial winner, followed the same course of action, for the same reasons. The minutes for its state board meeting on July 7 likewise show unanimous approval of Common Core standards “in their entirety” as a mandatory follow-through on the state’s RTT promises.¹⁰³

      The language of “verbatim adoption” and “in their entirety” is noteworthy because state officials who support Common Core now insist that states “can do as they please with the standards and make changes as they wish,” since they own the copyright, as the CCSSO director Chris Minnich told a reporter.¹⁰⁴ The copyright assertion has appeared in a number of state debates over a Common Core repeal. But it’s clear from original documents that states had to replace their curriculum mandates with Common Core in order to have a shot at RTT grants, a requirement that state officials clearly understood.

      The Obama administration followed the RTT grant inducements with another Common Core ratchet. On September 23, 2011, Duncan unilaterally suspended the No Child Left Behind law (passed in 2001) in favor of direct contracts with states that met his personal education policy preferences, rather than complying with the law. It’s not clear this was legal. In fact, two of the top Department of Education lawyers from the George W. Bush administration argued that Bush’s signature law gave the secretary no such license.¹⁰⁵ But Duncan went ahead anyway, and congressional leaders did nothing about it except complain flaccidly.

      The NCLB waivers lifted legally prescribed sanctions on low-performing schools — such as a possible takeover by a private management company — in exchange for an extralegal requirement that states essentially adopt Common Core. As with the RTT grants, the states could use “college- and career-ready standards” that were “common to a significant number of States,” or have state institutions of higher education certify a state’s standards on Common Core criteria.¹⁰⁶ Only one state, Minnesota, chose the second option in its initial waiver application. Forty-five states have applied, and all but two of them have received the waivers so far.¹⁰⁷ When Oklahoma repealed Common Core in 2014 and formed a committee to write a replacement, Duncan yanked its NCLB waiver until the state’s institutions of higher education quickly certified that Oklahoma’s previous curriculum mandates (which were being used in the interim) met federal requirements.

      Nationalizing Tests

      Still think Common Core was state-led? The federal government, as noted earlier, also funded and oversaw the development of the national tests that constitute the second half of the initiative. In 2010, the Obama administration provided four-year grants totaling $330 million to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), for the purpose of writing tests aligned with the Common Core curriculum.¹⁰⁸ In return for this largesse, the two organizations submitted to monthly and quarterly meetings and regular conference calls with U.S. Department of Education employees,¹⁰⁹ and to oversight by a specially appointed federal board that had access to and power over every aspect of the tests, down to the specific questions.¹¹⁰

      PARCC and Smarter Balanced are not just testing organizations. Their grant agreements with the federal government reveal that they have directly written curriculum materials and models for classroom activities.

      SBAC’s contract with the federal government said the consortium would provide “curriculum

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