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no role in developing, reviewing, or approving the standards.”⁷⁸ No role at all — if you don’t count the deep professional relationships, the regular phone calls, and the funding streams between the U.S. Department of Education, Gates, NGA, Achieve, and CCSSO.

      Over the next few months, the nonprofit triumvirate set about to commission new education standards. No more than a handful of sitting elected officials are named as endorsing the project in the press releases from NGA and Hunt during that time. (NGA spokesmen refused requests for comment.) Most of the governors Linn named as influencing the process were former elected officials.

      On June 1, 2009, NGA and CCSSO announced that forty-six states (along with three territories) had committed to “joining a state-led process to develop a common core of state standards,” but did not explain what “joining” entailed.⁷⁹ An education forum sponsored by NGA and the Hunt Institute two weeks later featured direct advocacy for national standards to twenty-one governors and their staff.⁸⁰ The organizations did not release the names of attendees at the invitation-only event.

      At the forum, Secretary Duncan spoke of national education standards as a federal-state partnership. “[M]y job is to help you succeed” in adopting “common national standards,” he told the assembly.⁸¹ States had initiated Common Core, Duncan said, because a commission of fifteen people headed by two former governors and funded by the Gates Foundation had recommended national standards in 2007.⁸² The federal government “empowers states to decide what kids need to learn and how to measure it,” he noted, adding that one of the ways it would do so was by funding national tests. State-led, indeed!

      By the beginning of July, NGA and CCSSO had formed more committees. There were two work groups, with a total of twenty-five members (four of whom sat in both committees), to write standards in math and in English. These twenty-five people included a few professors but no K–12 teachers. There were also two feedback committees to provide research and advice to the writers. The feedback groups together included thirty-three people (again, with four involved in both), mostly professors but with one middle school math teacher.⁸³ That’s only one K–12 classroom teacher out of nearly sixty people selected to write or advise on K–12 standards. In September, NGA announced a “validation committee” whose job was to ensure that the standards were “research- and evidence-based,” as had been promised.⁸⁴ In addition, says Linn, six states formed their own committees of teachers to send comments on drafts to the NGA/CCSSO committees.

      According to Mark Bauerlein, an Emory University professor who sat on a feedback committee, the lead writers were David Coleman and Susan Pimentel in English, and Jason Zimba, Phil Daro, and William McCallum in math. Linn points to Coleman and Zimba as the top dogs for what went into the English and math sections, respectively,⁸⁵ and neither of them had previous experience writing education standards. None of these five lead writers had ever been a K–12 teacher before being appointed to tell K–12 teachers across the nation how to do their jobs. For some reason, that apparently mattered little to whoever hired them.

      The writing process and surrounding discussions were sealed by confidentiality agreements. Feedback committee members weren’t sure what effect their advice had, said Bauerlein. “I have no idea how much influence committee members had on the final product. Some of the things I advised made their way into the standards. Some of them didn’t. I’m not sure why or how,” he said.

      Several people on the validation committee said the same: they had no idea what happened to the comments they submitted. James Milgram, a Stanford University professor who sat on the validation committee, described how the “facilitators” for the committee meeting “were virtually impossible to deal with.” In an email, he explained, “The facilitators were emphatically trying to not let us act according to our charter, but simply sign or not sign a [final approval] letter when the charter said we had final say over the quality of the final [Common Core] and could revise or rewrite it if we deemed it necessary.”

      Milgram was one of only two subject-matter experts on the validation committee, meaning the only ones with doctorates and field experience in their specific subjects — Milgram in math, and Sandra Stotsky in English. Both had a large hand in writing the nation’s best academic standards, those of California and Massachusetts, respectively.

      Five of the twenty-nine people on the validation committee refused to sign off on Common Core. Stotsky told me that she and several others had sent objections in writing to their NGA and CCSSO handlers. But the validation committee’s final report does not mention those objections.⁸⁶ Stotsky said the report’s author told her after it was completed that he had never received any written objections and would have included them if he had.

      When government agencies solicit public comments on proposed policies, standard procedure is for the agency to publish all comments submitted and a response to each general line of criticism. This didn’t happen with Common Core.

      Fed-Led Ed

      Common Core supporters were able to piece together their creation behind the closed doors of private foundations, but no private organization could make anyone submit to it. A private foundation can bribe people, but not even Bill Gates could bribe every state to adopt his favored curriculum model. The federal government could bring muscle. Under the Obama administration, it did.

      Proponents of Common Core know that Americans are generally wary of the federal government getting too close to education, so they use the “state-led” label almost obsessively when confronted with concerns about who brewed up the scheme and the extent of federal involvement in it. Prominent Core supporters have echoed the refrain everywhere their platforms have taken them in recent years. Bill Bennett, the Reagan-era education secretary, described Common Core in the Wall Street Journal as “a voluntary agreement among states.”⁸⁷ Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, opined in 2014 that the opposition to Common Core “has been mostly fueled by President Obama and his administration attempting to take credit for and co-opt a state-led initiative.”⁸⁸

      So what do the advocates mean by “state-led”? Did an assembly of state officials sit down and write the national standards? Did state legislatures or boards of education initiate and carry out this project? No. Its creators and promoters included practically no elected officials. None of the governors who worked directly on the project were serving in office at the time of their involvement. Elected or even appointed state officials became formally involved only after Common Core appeared as a finished product.

      Rather than “state-led,” it is far more accurate to call the initiative “special interest–led” or “Gates-led.” Common Core was developed within private organizations, in coordination with the Obama administration. It is true that governors and state superintendents signed a “memorandum of agreement” with NGA and CCSSO to kick off the development of Common Core, but that document itself contradicts the “state-led” talking point in two ways.

      First, like the “Benchmarking for Success” report that NGA, CCSSO, and Achieve published in 2008, this memorandum explicitly requests federal involvement in Common Core, saying there is “an appropriate federal role in supporting this state-led effort.”⁸⁹ This role was expected to include funding the development of the Common Core standards and the corresponding national tests; giving states “incentives” to adopt the standards and restructure their education systems around them; giving states money to train teachers in Common Core and otherwise move it into place; and changing federal education laws to fit the experiment. The Obama administration subsequently did all these things.

      Second, the agreement defines Common Core itself as a set of blueprints not just for curriculum, but also for national tests. Those tests are to enforce the curriculum mandates by measuring how well schools have instructed children in what the document demands. “High quality assessments go hand-in-hand with high quality instruction based on high quality standards. You cannot have one without the other,” said Laura Slover, CEO of PARCC, one of the Common Core testing organizations funded by the federal government. “The PARCC states see quality assessments as a part of instruction, not a break from instruction.”⁹⁰ The Obama administration not only

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