WORCESTER, Mass. – U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has a remarkable gift for bringing people together.

On Wednesday morning, Duncan managed to attract a group of approximately two dozen people – made up of Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Tea Party activists and one Anarchist –to protest his visit to a Worcester high school, reports MassLive.com.

Specifically, the motley group of activists was protesting Common Core – the nationalized learning standards that Duncan has been tirelessly promoting for the past several years – and the PARCC test, a new Common Core-aligned standardized assessment that’ll be hitting Massachusetts schools in 2015.

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Conservatives and libertarians don’t like Common Core because they believe it gives the busybody social engineers in Washington D.C. far too much influence over what happens in the nation’s K-12 classrooms.

Ultimately, they fear losing that long-held American principle of locally controlled schools.

As one unidentified woman explained, “Our state is number one in education. Why would we change that? Why do we want to dumb down our system to go to a national standard?”

On the other end of the political spectrum, progressives don’t like Common Core’s emphasis on standardized testing, or the Obama administration’s attempts – through its No Child Left Behind waivers and Race to the Top financial grants – to link students’ test scores to teacher evaluations.

(It’s unclear what the anarchist was upset about, exactly. That individual may have been protesting the fact that society makes him (or her) wear pants when in public. Who knows?)

Overall, the protestors reportedly felt good about what they accomplished with their rally.

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“I thought this was a great opportunity to organize and get in front of him,” Donna Colorio, a former Worcester school board member told MassLive.com. “Whether he saw us or not, I know he knows we were here protesting. This was an opportunity to have our voices heard on a federal level.”

Registered Democrat Shanon Dahlstrom agreed it was time well spent.

“It’s a great opportunity to bring attention to this community here in Massachusetts. The U.S. Department of Education is really overstepping their bounds,” Dahlstrom told the news site.

The only complaint seemed to be that there weren’t more people in attendance.

“More young people need to get involved in their children’s education,” said 30-year-old Jeff Moberg.