Stand for Children Indiana, a pro-common-core group, which supports broad early-education opportunities and charter schools, released two different 30-second TV advertisements, one on March 5 and another on April 16, defending the standards. The campaign also included radio spots.
A spokesman for the group, Jay Kenworthy, declined to disclose how much it spent on the ads and said it hadn't decided whether to renew the public relations push when common-core hearings get underway in Indiana this summer.
That state is also ground zero for a pro-common-core argument aimed at a liberal audience: that many of the loudest common-core opponents hold other political views that the audience would find abhorrent.
For example, Larry Grau, the director of the Indiana affiliate of Democrats for Education Reform, or DFER, wrote on the group's blog April 23 that GOP Sen. Scott Schneider wants schools to teach creationism and has sought to make enforcement of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act a felony. DFER Indiana has also used language that warned about "bedfellows" in the anti-common-core movement that could cause someone to say, "I hate myself for this in the morning." Mr. Grau said he wanted the group's rhetoric to be "a little edgy."
He argued that Democrats suspicious of other policy proposals, like vouchers, should not let those views lead them to lash out at the common core. "They're not thinking before they're saying who they're partnering with on the common core," Mr. Grau said in an interview.
Common Core Federal Standards proponents are scared now that many on the right have woken up to the dangers of the CCFS:
But supporters also were jolted by the Republican National Committee's decision last month to oppose the standards, said Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the pro-common-core Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington.
"Some people have suddenly discovered that they might need a few people with at least faint Republican credentials besides [former Florida Gov.] Jeb Bush to say that the common core is a good thing," he said. He added that he thought conservative efforts in state legislatures posed the bigger threat to the common standards, compared with opposition from the political left.
If corporate education reformers have to start fighting both right and left to save their precious standards, they've got their work cut out for them.
They know that.
So they're implementing a divide and conquer strategy:
Hey, progressives, don't partner with that Tea Party group from Indiana because they're creationists and anti-abortion advocates!
Hey, Tea Partiers, don't partner with those Upper West Side commie pinko liberals because they're, you know, Upper West Side commie pinko liberals!
Common Core proponents are scraping the bottom of the barrel when that's one of the strategies they're employing to save their standards movement.
I, for one, am happy to work with people on the right against the Common Core.
I like to use Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul as my model for that kind of work.
Sure Kucinich and Paul might not have agreed on a lot of different policies, but there were some core ones they agreed upon, including opposition to the Surveillance State, opposition to overseas wars and the need to add some transparency to the Federal Reserve.
Those men worked together on those issues, even if on other issues they were as far apart as the sun and the moon.
Progressive and Tea Partiers can work similarly against Common Core.
Yes, the two sides may oppose Common Core for different reasons.
But the important thing is, both sides oppose this federal curriculum and are fighting to repeal it in state after state after state all across the nation.
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