By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

MUSKEGON, Mich. – Three years ago, Americans in 46 states received quite a surprise.

Seemingly overnight, their state school education officials decided to cast aside existing K-12 learning standards for math and English, in favor of a set of federally endorsed experimental standards known as Common Core.

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Obtaining a share of $4 billion in federal stimulus funds obviously had something to do with the states’ willingness to cooperate.

And for the vast majority of states, the switch was made with no involvement from state legislators or taxpayers.

The implications took a while to sink in.

But now citizens across the nation are starting to understand the huge change that the program will bring to local schools. In many states efforts are under way to at least stall the implementation process until much more is learned about Common Core.

Starting today, EAGnews is dedicating a new section of its website to the Common Core debate in each state.

Visitors to EAGnews’ “Common Core Watch” webpage will find an interactive map that highlights where each state stands in the ongoing Common Core debate. The 46 pro-Common Core states are shown in red, while the four states that haven’t signed on – Alaska, Virginia, Texas, and Nebraska – are shaded blue. (Minnesota is shaded red, even though it only adopted the Common Core standards for English, not math.)

By clicking on each state, users will be presented with an informational box that contains links to anti-Common Core legislation (if applicable), the latest state news about the standards, and state groups that are working to overturn the nationalized standards.

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Below the interactive map is a list of news stories and op-eds that document the latest developments in the Common Core debate. Stories will be added throughout each day, as they become available.

Americans start waking up

Many Americans had no idea what Common Core was when the new standards were officially announced on June 2, 2010.

In fact, many Americans were still reeling from the debate surrounding “Obamacare” – which had been signed into law just weeks earlier – to even consider how the innocent-sounding initiative would transform their neighborhood schools.

The average American may not have been paying attention to Common Core, but their school leaders certainly were. Schools in all but five states began implementing the new learning standards immediately.

Over time, it dawned on more Americans that something big was going on inside their children’s schools: The teachers were teaching differently and their assignments were difficult for students (and parents) to understand.

When parents questioned school leaders, they discovered the changes were required under Common Core and that administrators were powerless to stop it.

Parents shared their concerns with state lawmakers, who started holding hearings on Common Core.

Lawmakers soon discovered that Common Core had never been field tested anywhere in the country, and that it was being advanced by powerful special interests, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Legislators in several states – most notably Indiana, Wisconsin, Alabama, Georgia and Michigan – introduced bills to repeal Common Core or block its implementation until the program could be thoroughly investigated.

Common Core advocates quickly advanced the narrative that critics were only a bunch of cranky conservatives and tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists.

They said most rational people understood the Common Core standards were “rigorous” and the perfect remedy for America’s faltering education system.

Until very recently, those were the parameters of the Common Core controversy.

An editorial reframed the debate

On June 8, 2013, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus that reframed the debate.

“As it stands, the Common Core is currently getting hit mainly from the right,” write Hacker and Dreifus. “Tea Party-like groups have been gaining traction in opposition to the program, arguing that it is another intrusion into the lives of ordinary Americans by a faceless elite. While we don’t often agree with the Tea Party, we’ve concluded that there’s more than a grain of truth to their concerns.

“The anxiety that drives this criticism comes from the fact that a radical curriculum – one that has the potential to affect more than 50 million children and their parents – was introduced with hardly any public discussion. Americans know more about the events in Benghazi than they do about Common Core,” Hacker and Dreifus note.

It’s too early to know if The New York Times’ analysis represents a tipping point in the Common Core debate, but it certainly represents a major plot twist.

There will be many more twists and turns as taxpayers and lawmakers in at least nine states race to stop Common Core before it’s fully implemented for the 2014-15 school year.

EAGnews’ “Common Core Watch” page is meant to serve as a one-stop destination for readers who are interested in following this important debate about the future of K-12 education in America.

It’s been said that if Common Core takes root, it will gradually shift decision-making power away from local school board members and state officials and toward the anonymous and unelected individuals who will write the Common Core-related standardized tests and the corresponding learning materials.

Because teacher job evaluations will be linked to their students’ Common Core test scores, it’s reasonable to expect educators to tailor their lessons to the topics covered on the standardized tests.

That gives the private test-making companies – and the federal bureaucrats who will be working with them – a backdoor way of influencing what’s taught in America’s classrooms.

Will such revelations rally enough Americans to stop Common Core before it takes full effect in just 14 months?

We can’t say.

All we know is that Common Core is the public policy equivalent of an arranged marriage, and that’s never been a popular custom in “the Land of the Free.”

The next year promises to be full of new developments in this unfolding drama, and EAGnews will be there to chronicle every one.