WASHINGTON, D.C. – The recent announcement from the National Education Association – America’s largest teachers union – that Common Core needs a “major course correction” was a pleasant surprise to right-of-center critics of the nationalized learning standards.

One in-the-know analyst, however, says the union’s about-face was entirely predictable.

Frederick Hess, director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, writes in a new column that teacher union support of Common Core “was always a mile wide and an inch deep.”

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Hess points out that the NEA’s and the American Federation of Teachers’ enthusiasm for Common Core “was greatly aided by federal inducements,” such at the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program and No Child Left Behind waivers.

He suggests that teachers also liked the idea of a nationalized, uniform approach to K-12 education because it would “be easier to share curricula and lesson plans,” and learning materials and tests would be “portable across state lines.”

Educators also expected to benefit from “a more common professional language,” Hess suggests.

However, none of those benefits guaranteed that educators would get on board with all the “other” stuff connected to the nationalized standards.

“As Common Core shifted from an amorphous commitment to ‘high standards’ into something that affected classrooms, instruction, homework, and teacher evaluation,” Hess writes, it was predictable that “support would narrow and opposition would increase.”

Hess suggests two ways conservatives can respond to the unions’ Common Core predicament:

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“One response might be bemusement — a calculation that the unions helped make their bed and now must lie in it. But a more productive response is to recognize that the unions are frustrated by the same things that have frustrated conservative school reformers in recent years — the eagerness of the Obama administration to impose its particular school-reform agenda on states, as rapidly as possible and by whatever means necessary.

“The backlash is the product of the kind of compliance-driven silliness that results when well-intentioned progressives in Washington, in foundations, and in national advocacy groups rush to force schools and states to adopt their pet reforms.

“The danger with the sweeping ambition of technocratic reformers is something that conservatives have long recognized. If the teachers’ unions now see it too, so much the better.”