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to defend themselves against the charge of wanting to become a national school board.”²¹ Accordingly, the Common Core project was led by a collection of private lobbying groups, with a handful of public officials adding their names, including a few former governors: James Hunt (North Carolina), Richard Riley (South Carolina), and Bob Wise (West Virginia).²² At most, only a minuscule fraction of the nation’s elected state officials had a part in developing this “state-led” initiative.

      Common Core grew under the radar, then, making almost no news until it was a done deal. While media outlets of all sizes and audiences were giving copious attention to the Obamacare debate that raged in summer 2010, they published close to nothing about the education mandates that came out around the same time. The backlash took a few years to swell because people can’t protest what they don’t know is coming.

      I first heard about Common Core in fall 2012 from Heather Crossin, the Indianapolis mother we met in the prologue who objected to the convoluted math her daughter was being taught. Then I started trying to figure out who exactly made it, and by what process. I contacted every major organization that was openly named as having a hand in it, as well as several dozen of the individuals listed as contributors on Common Core documents. Nearly all refused an interview; others simply ignored my repeated emails and phone calls.

      A Gates-Led Scheme

      Once Common Core had actually become news, and four years after it gained control of American education, three top Core-pushers sought a Washington Post interview.²³ This is a common public relations technique for trying to contain negative press, which at that point was increasing rapidly: Reach out to a friendly reporter and offer an exclusive interview where you “reveal” your side of the story. The interviewees carefully prep their tale. It’s called “staying on message” and “controlling the narrative.”

      The Post article that appeared in June 2014 featured Bill Gates, whose foundation funded almost the entire project; David Coleman, one of Common Core’s five “lead writers,” dubbed “the architect of Common Core” by media outlets; and Gene Wilhoit, who served as president of the Council of Chief State School Officers while it midwifed Common Core. CCSSO is a private networking and lobbying organization that has pushed national curriculum mandates for decades and was explicitly named as a potential vehicle for national standards in the Brookings paper cited above.

      “One summer day in 2008,” the Post reported, Coleman and Wilhoit visited the Gates Foundation’s massive Seattle compound of glass-encased, V-shaped offices. It’s only logical they went to Gates. The three biggest education grant makers are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. Gates is by far the largest. In total assets, Walton has $1.7 billion,²⁴ Broad, $2.2 billion,²⁵ and Gates, $37 billion,²⁶ according to public tax documents.

      Coleman and Wilhoit pushed Gates to bankroll Common Core, citing the high remediation rates for U.S. college freshmen and the need for nationally interchangeable K–12 curriculum. A poor K–12 system drags down the economy, they noted. A few weeks later, Wilhoit told the Post, Gates called and said he was in.

      And how. Gates’s foundation, the richest in the world, gave CCSSO an initial $10 million grant to have people write Common Core, and began sending millions of dollars to every conceivable organization in the United States to grease the skids. Gates paid to have lobbyists prod lawmakers to adopt Common Core, to help teachers unions write curriculum and coordinate public relations campaigns, to have researchers compare Common Core with existing state curriculum standards (and, unsurprisingly, pronounce the former superior) — you name a Common Core component, Gates paid for it.

      The Gates Foundation has given millions to state and federal departments of education, and to national teachers unions. It has spent hundreds of thousands to “assist state education agencies in tying teacher evaluations to Common Core.” It has spent millions to sponsor forums where advocacy groups have lobbied governors, state school board members, state lawmakers, local school board members, business leaders, teachers, military representatives, and other key groups to accept and promote Common Core. It has given millions toward developing “parent advocacy training modules.”

      From 2009 to June 2016, the Gates Foundation dished out $384,605,464 in Common Core–related grants. The greater part of it, some $269 million, went to public relations efforts, such as training teachers to go on camera for TV ads, and gathering lawmakers in posh locales to explain how wonderful Common Core will be for the nation.²⁷ Two years after that 2008 meeting in Seattle between Gates, Coleman, and Wilhoit, forty-five states and the District of Columbia had accepted Common Core, to nearly no public fanfare. Wyoming signed on the following year, bringing the total to forty-six states.

      “Without the Gates money, we wouldn’t have been able to do this,” said Kentucky’s education commissioner, Terry Holliday, to the Post. Holliday was on CCSSO’s board of directors while it facilitated Common Core, and subsequently became its president. And he wasn’t kidding about the Gates money. But throwing money at everything labeled “Common Core” was only a part of Gates’s influence peddling, which has since sparked debate among wonks and watchdogs over whether some of its activities served as a cloak for government actions and amounted to tax-free, disclosure-free lobbying.

      Over the years, the Gates Foundation has steadily increased its grants for education, particularly for advocacy, said Sarah Reckhow, a political science professor at Michigan State University who has studied education philanthropists. She calculated that 20 percent of its education grants went to advocacy in 2010, while its grants to schools had dropped from 50 percent in 2005 to 25 percent.²⁸ A quarter of education spending by the Gates and Broad foundations in 2010 went to nationwide advocacy of Common Core, Reckhow later found.²⁹ The same trend has been noted in education philanthropy generally: large education foundations such as Gates, Broad, and Walton have moved from sponsoring local charity to sponsoring political activism.³⁰ The reason is that in a centralized system it’s easier to influence the few people who have power than to convince the public at large to go along with one group’s agenda.

      Philanthropists “don’t have an obvious constituency,” Reckhow observed. “Teachers unions represent teachers. Who does the Gates Foundation represent?”

      Manufacturing Consensus

      The Gates Foundation confirmed but did not return my repeated calls and emails requesting comment on their role in developing and promoting Common Core, but employees have granted other interviews. After all, “systemic changes” require advocacy, as Allan Golston, president of Gates’s U.S. program, told the New York Times in 2011. Gates funds myriad seemingly grassroots education groups, the Times article noted.³¹ An academic study Reckhow coauthored with Megan Tompkins-Stange in 2014 that includes anonymous interviews with Gates employees found this was a deliberate strategy to build an ersatz grassroots movement. “All of these organizations suddenly singing from the same hymnbook are all getting money from the same organization,” one Gates official said, adding, “we fund almost everyone who does advocacy.”³²

      Gates funds advocacy not just to influence lawmakers directly, but also to influence the groups that influence lawmakers, thereby creating a kind of echo chamber, a Gates employee explained. An organization with the size and resources of Gates “can make grants to lots of organizations to promote a certain message not just . . . with government but also with business and with the public.”³³

      This kind of manufactured “consensus,” disguised as a grassroots movement, muddied the waters for local elected officials when they deliberated over education policy. Take, for example, a January 2013 legislative hearing in Indiana, which would become the first state to repeal Common Core. Among the thirty-two people who testified against the repeal, twenty-six were members of organizations that received money from the Gates Foundation. That’s more than three-quarters of the anti-repeal voices. Gates also funded Common Core proponents who came out in force to oppose a repeal bill in Georgia in 2014.³⁴ I witnessed the same pattern myself when testifying against Common Core in 2014 hearings on similar bills in Wisconsin and Tennessee.

      “Gates

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