You sort of figure that this is what liberals sound like when they gather behind closed doors amongst themselves. The condescension rules, toward white suburbanites, toward Christians, toward just about everybody other than them. But what's really fun is when one of them gets around just enough fellow travelers that he forgets he's actually in public. That's when you get statements like this:
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of state schools superintendents Friday that he found it “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
Yes, he really said that. But he has said similar things before. What, exactly, is he talking about?
In his cheerleading for the controversial Common Core State Standards — which were approved by 45 states and the District of Columbia and are now being implemented across the country (though some states are reconsidering) — Duncan has repeatedly noted that the standards and the standardized testing that goes along with them are more difficult than students in most states have confronted.
The conceit behind Common Core is largely the same as that behind ObamaCare
The conceit behind Common Core is largely the same as that behind ObamaCare: Everything is substandard unless the federal government creates and enforces the standards, so just as you dummies were once blissfully ignorant with your "cut-rate" health plan, you need Washington to show you how inadequat your local yokel educators are. They'll rewrite the curriculum for you. Then they'll use their power of taxation to confiscate all kinds of money your state might have used to fund education, but offer it back to you provided, of course, you use the curriculum they've written.
And the justification for all this? Why we're now in a global education race, and we have to "win," whatever that means. It's no longer Bloomfield Township vs. Farmington Hills. It's now the U.S. against the Germans and the Chinese. I don't know what makes them think we are more likely to "win" this "competition" when Washington writes the standards, or more importantly, what makes people believe it when they say that.
But that's sort of the point. An awful lot of people don't, so Arne Duncan needs to make sure we know that's just a bunch of "white suburban moms" who want to bask in the delusion that the school down the street is just fine. This is why we need uppity bureaucrats, to save us from our fat-and-happy illusions.
By the way, the Washington Post story linked above also informs us that one of Common Core's teacher union backers is fretting the Common Core rollout is going about as well as that of ObamaCare - but you haven't heard about that yet. Probably just as well. White suburban moms might start getting ideas, and we can't have that.
