I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. However, while we were celebrating the holiday congress was at it again. It’s another, we have to pass the bill to see what’s in it - but with additional intrigue thrown in for good measure.

The latest example is the ESEA reauthorization legislation that would breathe new life into the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. This legislation, hatched during the LBJ administration later metastasized into No Child Left Behind in 2001. NCLB was up for renewal in 2007, but that renewal never happened. Since then, the status of that legislation has been in limbo with states filing for waivers to officially get out from under.

One would think that congress might have done well to let ESEA/NCLB expire peacefully and let education once again be the province of state government as is constitutional and proper. However, congress seems to think that bad legislation, instead of being repealed, needs to be “replaced” - too often with more bad legislation. So after eight years in a coma, this zombie legislation is being brought back from the dead.

The Senate version is called the Every Child Achieves Act or ECAA and the House version is called the Student Success Act or SSA. Pardon my cynicism, but the very names of the bills give me pause. However, they have been run through the congressional legislative meat grinder - a process called “reconciliation” - and what has emerged from the back room sessions is an enormous bill called the ESEA reauthorization act. The consolidated bill allegedly was finished on the day before Thanksgiving, contains hundreds of pages and will be forced to a vote on December 2nd. That’s right, just like the Affordable Care Act, no one will have time to read it.

Coincidentally (or maybe not) on November 25th, the same day the legislation was completed, an article appeared in Education Week, headquartered in nearby Bethesda, that took on one of the grassroots leaders of the opposition to the bill. In the article reporter Alyson Klein poses the question, “Remember Christel Swasey, the conservative blogger and English teacher, whose viral blog post seems to have helped put the brakes, (temporarily) on reauthorization of the [ESEA]…back in February? Well, she’s not much happier with the latest version of the legislation, a bipartisan, bicameral deal negotiated…largely behind the scenes, that sailed through a conference committee last week”. Largely behind the scenes. Got that? Swasey has a problem with that (as do I) and she also feels that the ESEA legislation is an end run around the tremendous national backlash to Common Core.

Klein’s article in Education Week appears to have been in response to a blog post by Swasey entitled #StopESEA. In it Swasey refers to “a letter signed by over 200 grassroots organizations” demanding that a vote on the ESEA bill be delayed for 60 days so that legislators have time to read it and those opposing have an opportunity to say their peace. Sounds reasonable to me, but not to Klein who commented, “That would be an unusually long time frame by congressional standards”.

The fact that this legislation was introduced during a holiday week with little time for review raises obvious suspicions and concerns. Swasey adds to the concerns by pointing out that the phrase Common Core appears nowhere in the bill, and she suspects that one of the talking points will be that it will be “common core free”. She says that instead the legislation “deceptively” uses the phrases “career and college ready standards” or “career and college readiness” which are substitutes for the term “common core”. More on that later.

Here in West Virginia, I’m concerned that perhaps the same deception is being foisted on an unsuspecting public. As reported with great fanfare on Metro News, was this headline: “Martirano, state board recommend repeal of Next Gen/Common Core”. Here’s the quote in the article from State School Superintendent Martirano (are you ready for this?): “I recommend repeal [of the] Next Generation Standards which the basis was Common Core and replace them with West Virginia College & Career Readiness.”

So the new ESEA bill that no member of congress will have time to read essentially renames Common Core “career and college readiness”. And here in West Virginia the state Superintendent of the school system, Dr. Michael Martirano announces that West Virginia is going to “replace” Next Gen/Common Core with “West Virginia College & Career Readiness”. This cannot possibly be a coincidence. The obvious concern is that West Virginia is not repealing Common Core at all - it may just be a name change. Now wouldn’t that be “deceptive”?

West Virginia State Senate President Bill Coles is running for governor and has made a campaign promise to do away with Common Core in our state. I think we need reassurances from him that he really does support ending Common Core and that we aren’t simply renaming it. In the race for the Republican nomination for President there is now only one candidate that supports Common Core and that is Jeb Bush. Even New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie a former Common Core supporter has done away with it in his state.

Christel Swasey is a teacher and mother from Utah. One might wonder why a national publication like Education Week would make the effort to try and discredit her. People tell me to “follow the money”. So I did. According to Washington Monthly, since 2005, Editorial Projects in Education, the non-profit publisher of Education Week has received $7.85 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates is of course the founder of Microsoft.

Washington Monthly lauds Education Week’s “extensive and detailed disclosure about funding it has received from the Gates Foundation, including dollar figures broken out for specific projects and time periods”. For their part, Education Week claims that it “retains sole editorial control over the content of its coverage under the Gates grants”.

That may be, but I found a detail that is more than interesting. The last contribution from the Gates Foundation was described by Education Week as “a $750,000 one - year grant, starting in 2014, to support coverage of the implementation of college -and career- ready standards”. That’s not how it reads on the gatesfoundation.org website. There it says that the purpose of the grant was “to support coverage on implementation of Common Core State Standards”.  

So it might appear that “West Virginia College & Career Readiness” is not a replacement for Common Core at all - but just an attempt to fool the public. I don’t like it when someone tries to pull the wool over my eyes. I’m sure you don’t either.