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December 2019

Climate Science Proves Scams Don’t Die of Exposure Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/11/ten-years-after-climategate/

It’s the tenth anniversary next week of the 2009 Climategate email dump that exposed top climate scientists’ chicanery and subversion of science – and did so in their own words and out of their own mouths, or keyboards. I’ll list a few emails-of-infamy shortly, but first some background.

For the three years before Climategate, the climate crowd was ascendant with its pseudo-narrative of “settled science”. Al Gore’s error-riddled propaganda movie Inconvenient Truth of 2006 had swept the Western world and its readily-traduced schoolkids. In 2007 Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize. In late 2008 Barack Obama won the White House, proclaiming in his modest way, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

The Climategate emails hit the blogosphere just a month before the Copenhagen summit was scheduled to lock Western countries into Kyoto Mark 2, a legally-binding commitment to renewables from 2012. Climategate destroyed warmists’ moral high ground and reinforced the natural reluctance of most governments to up-end their economies with emission controls. The  Copenhagen circus fell apart, resolving merely to “take note” of the exhortations to action by Obama and like-minded leaders.

The mainstream media strove to ignore and bury the Climategate  revelations. The climate establishment ran half a dozen inquiries with limited briefs and ludicrous lack of rigour, all of which purported to clear the climate scientists of wrong-doing.[1] But even today, ten years after, scientists faithful to their calling and disciplines can only shudder at what Climategate revealed. Those who subverted the scientific method were not fringe players but at the pinnacle. They were doing the archetypal studies “proving” catastrophic human-caused catastrophic warming (CAGW) and shaping the content and messaging in the six-yearly reports of the IPCC.

Sanctuary for Gays: Ignored or Jeered at by West by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15232/gay-palestinians

“Israel has always embraced this path [of liberty] in a Middle East that has long rejected it. In a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted, Israel stands out. It is different.” – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to the U.S. Senate, 2011.
Adam and Rami are among scores of Palestinian members of the LTBGQ community who, in the past few decades, have fled their homes to seek shelter in Israel. Yet, their plight is totally ignored not only by human rights organizations, but by but by people who purport to be advocates of gay rights. This is part of a far more malignant story: when Israel looks good, the international community looks away.
Hate for Israel has blinded people to the point where they align themselves with their own executioners.
alQaws pointed out that some Palestinian groups actually celebrated the police threat against the LTBGQ community, “raising (yet again) disturbing questions about the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to human rights.”
Palestinian gays have two choices: hide their sexual preferences and lead double lives in their villages, or flee to Israel and live as normal human beings. Groups such as Queers for Palestine, though, are too busy bashing Israel on college campuses and the streets of San Francisco to take much notice of the sanctuary to which their gay Palestinian friends have chosen to relocate.

Members of the Palestinian LTBGQ community continue to flee to Israel, where, unlike under the Hamas and Palestinian Authority regimes, they are free to lead normal lives.

The gay community in the West, however, has evidently chosen to ignore the plight of their friends living under the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and under Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Remarkably, rather than reaching out to help the Palestinian LTBGQ members, several gay groups in the West, including in the US, continue to spout hate against Israel, the only country in the Middle East where the LTBGQ community feels safe and secure.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a 2011 speech to the US Senate:

“Israel has always embraced this path [of liberty] in a Middle East that has long rejected it. In a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted, Israel stands out. It is different.”

Groups such as “Queers for Palestine” and “Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism” have long been inciting against Israel, even as Palestinian gays are fleeing persecution and the threat of death under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Both groups, rather than helping gays, noisily advocate financial divestment from Israel, and their members regularly demonstrate at gay pride marches and collaborate with extremist Muslim organizations.

The Western members of the LTBGQ community are eagerly joining forces with the very parties who are persecuting and killing their Palestinian allies — as long as that advances the anti-Israel agenda of those who hate Israel more than they care about gays.

THE UN IS HOLDING ITS 25TH CLIMATE CONFERENCE-PLEASE LET THERE NOT BE ANOTHER ONE

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/12/06/the-u-n-is-holding-its-25th-climate-conference-please-dont-let-there-be-a-26th/

Has there ever been a bigger assembly of scolds and nattering nabobs of nonsense than those gathered at the United Nations Conference Of The Parties 25 this week in Madrid? Spare us another of these hootenannies of insufferable elitism.

Before the party even started, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres showed up in Spain to tell us “the point of no return is no longer over the horizon,” and “is in sight and hurtling toward us.”

How long have we been hearing this? Prince Charles has been predicting imminent doomsday for more than a decade, as has Al Gore. Before the conference began, Vice was trying to convince the world that “The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun,” while Extinction Rebellion has been barking madly that “billions will die” and “life on Earth is dying” because of man’s use of fossil fuels.

Despite decades of warnings that the end “is in sight,” as the Competitive Enterprise Institute recently assured us, “none of the apocalyptic predictions” of environmental disaster “with due dates as of today have come true.”

As the conference’s nominal host, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez took up the cudgel because there can be no meeting of the climate clan without an othering of the “deniers.” “Luckily,” said Sánchez, “only a handful of fanatics deny the evidence.” What evidence would that be, Sr. Prime Minister?

Of course he can’t point to any evidence, because there is none.

A warming planet? Nothing in the record before 1979, when satellites began measuring thermal emissions in the atmosphere, is reliable. The satellite data show some warming, but nothing outside natural variations.

Receding glaciers and melting ice? “Polar ice sheets have not declined at all since NASA satellite instruments began precisely measuring them 35 years ago,” says James Taylor, who has written extensively about climate over the years. Meanwhile, “the Antarctic Ice Sheet has been growing at a steady and substantial pace ever since NASA satellites first began measuring the Antarctic ice sheet in 1979.” So about those glaciers? The global retreat that the alarmists can’t stop talking about is not new. It began before the Civil War was fought, “at the end of the Little Ice Age.” 

Increasing sea level? The oceans have been rising for 10,000 years. NASA says the rate of increase has been about 3.3 millimeters a year, not quite 0.13 of inch, for decades. Hardly cause for alarm.

More hurricanes? We repeat ourselves: “Global major hurricane frequency has been trending downward since 1980, while cyclone energy is roughly the same as it was in 1972.”

Growing wildfires? The media have been fixated on California’s fires, so let’s look there. And what do we find? Cal Fire, a government agency, has compiled data which show a steep drop-off in acres burned since 2008. The claim goes up in smoke.

Foggy Bottom Has the Sadz (and That’s a Very Good Thing) Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/05/foggy-bottom-has-the-sadz-and-thats-a-very-good-thing/

The real “crisis” for former State Department bureaucrats and their colleagues who have been recycled back to the Ivy League campuses from whence they came is not that Trump poses an existential threat to national security—it’s that he poses a legitimate threat to their professional sinecures.

As House Democrats invited Ivy League shrews to publicly grind their Trump-hating axe during Wednesday’s disastrous impeachment charade, President Trump returned home after confronting our allies again about their lagging financial support of NATO. The stale pact turns 70 this year and like too many Boomers these days, NATO is out of fresh ideas and still listening to worn tracks of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” while the rest of the world is listening to Drake.

Also like so many Boomers, NATO members have made financial promises they won’t keep, stacking up IOUs for someone else to pay and hoping no one notices. But Trump, a Boomer himself, is having none of it.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau struggled to explain his country’s failure to fulfill the alliance’s agreement to earmark two percent of gross domestic product for defense spending—according to a NATO report, Canada only spent 1.2 percent of its GDP on defense in 2018: The United States spent nearly triple that amount. (While dismal, Canada’s expenditure last year is an improvement over 2014 when it only spent 1 percent.)

So Trump used a press conference to challenge Trudeau. “We’ll put Canada on a payment plan, I’m sure the prime minister would love that,” Trump jabbed when asked by a reporter about Canada’s reneging on their NATO pledge.

After Trump pressed for a percentage—Trudeau had to refer to an aide for the exact number—the Candians claimed they were at 1.4 percent. “They’ll get there. They know it’s important,” the president added.

We Must Not Ignore Christian Persecution Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/05/we-must-not-ignore-christian-persecution/

Editor’s note: The following are remarks delivered on November 26 to the 2nd International Conference on Christian Persecution in Budapest, Hungary. The mission of the event is “to find answers and solutions to the most neglected humanitarian and civilizational crisis of our time.”

Dear Mister President, I am here to say thank you for what you and your government have done to help Christianity. Hungary is the first country within the European Union that has actively promoted Christian based human rights.

This means most and above all, the protection of human life from conception to death. It also means the protection of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, the protection of the family, and of religious freedom.

Hungary is also, one hopes, not the only country in the European Union that has a targeted program to help Christians around the world and especially, Christians from the Middle East.

It is quite frustrating to us that we don’t hear of any such programs in our own rich countries.

The way priorities have shifted is very worrying. No one seems to take the streets for religious freedom and peace anymore.

The West seems to be more worried about global warming and animal life. But where have we come to, if plants and animals are more valued than human beings?

Even the Pope has declared a climate emergency! Of course, we all want to live in a healthy environment, but how can we accept and tolerate the most atrocious artificial proceedings, when it comes to our own species?

What on earth is more unnatural, unhealthy and traumatizing than hormone treatments for egg harvesting in surrogate moms for surrogate children? Or the traumatizing procedures for sex changes? What could possibly be more unnatural or unhealthy to body and soul than ripping babies to pieces to get them out of their mother’s womb? And the horrible practice of euthanasia happening in Europe today? All this while we insist on eating organic food?

Fraud in Higher Ed Combined with poor educational outcomes and gross indoctrination by leftist profs. Walter Williams

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/fraud-higher-education-walter-williams/

This year’s education scandal saw parents shelling out megabucks to gain college admittance for their children. Federal prosecutors have charged more than 50 people with participating in a scheme to get their children into colleges by cheating on entrance exams or bribing athletic coaches. They paid William Singer, a college-prep professional, more than $25 million to bribe coaches and university administrators and to change test scores on college admittance exams such as the SAT and ACT. As disgusting as this grossly dishonest behavior is, it is only the tiny tip of fraud in higher education.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2016, only 37% of white high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 70% of them. Roughly 17% of black high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 58% of them. A 2018 Hechinger Report found, “More than four in 10 college students end up in developmental math and English classes at an annual cost of approximately $7 billion, and many of them have a worse chance of eventually graduating than if they went straight into college-level classes.”

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, “when considering all first-time undergraduates, studies have found anywhere from 28 percent to 40 percent of students enroll in at least one remedial course. When looking at only community college students, several studies have found remediation rates surpassing 50 percent.” Only 25% of students who took the ACT in 2012 met the test’s readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math and science).

It’s clear that high schools confer diplomas that attest that a student can read, write and do math at a 12th-grade level when, in fact, most cannot. That means most high diplomas represent fraudulent documents. But when high school graduates enter college, what happens? To get a hint, we can turn to an article by Craig E. Klafter, “Good Grieve! America’s Grade Inflation Culture,” published in the Fall 2019 edition of Academic Questions. In 1940, only 15% of all grades awarded were A’s. By 2018, the average grade point average at some of the nation’s leading colleges was A-minus. For example, the average GPA at Brown University (3.75), Stanford (3.68), Harvard College (3.63), Yale University (3.63), Columbia University (3.6), University of California, Berkeley (3.59). 

The Truth is No Defense An interview with extraordinary freedom fighter Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff. Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/truth-no-defense-mark-tapson/

As the totalitarian left advances ever more successfully toward amending or abolishing freedom of speech, it is crucial to keep in mind that hand-in-hand with curtailing the speech of those who hold “incorrect” opinions comes the enforcement of Islamic blasphemy laws, the ulterior motive of which is to shield Islam from any criticism whatsoever. This has been the longstanding goal of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the world’s largest Muslim collective, which has worked closely with leftist allies such as Hillary Clinton to promote and implement such censorship. This already has been largely embraced among the multiculturalist elites in Europe; think, for example, of today’s England, where jihadist stabbings are rampant but complaining about them in a tweet will earn you a visit and stern lecture from the police, if not actual arrest.

To grasp just how unacceptable it is to speak the truth about Islam in a multiculturalist society, read Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff’s jaw-dropping account of her legal ordeal in Austria, titled The Truth is No Defense, recently published by New English Review Press. Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff is an Austrian human rights and anti-sharia activist who, as the daughter of a diplomat and then later as an ambassador’s assistant, had extensive experience living and working in Muslim countries (she was even held hostage during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait). She came to the unfortunate conclusion that sharia and Western values aren’t compatible.

In 2009 she found herself charged with “hate speech” in Austria over factual statements she made during a seminar she gave on Islam. Thus began a Kafkaesque legal odyssey resulting in her conviction for “denigrating the teachings of a legally recognized religion” – i.e. Islam, of course, because can anyone imagine that someone would ever be convicted of denigrating Christianity? Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff subsequently took her appeal before the European Court for Human Rights, but Europe tragically has no First Amendment and therefore, “the truth is no defense” when it comes to critiquing Islam. “This is what totalitarianism looks like,” the Freedom Center’s own Robert Spencer has said of her miscarriage of justice (Spencer is one of more than half a dozen notable experts who present insightful analyses of her case at the book’s conclusion).

Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff was recently in Los Angeles promoting her book, and graciously made the time to answer some questions.

‘Dream-Team’ Redux? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dream-team-redux/

If Nadler had any sense, he would simply fold his tent and stop the damage he is doing to House candidates in 2020.

There was a lot of pre-hearing hype about the Democrats’ supposedly stellar academic experts, sort of analogous to the giddiness about the “dream team,” “all-stars,” and “hunter-killer” legal eagles that Robert Mueller supposedly had assembled to pick apart the Trump carrion — and they likewise proved a complete dud.

There were a number of errors that reminded us why Pelosi had originally outsourced the impeachment gambit to the duplicitous but cunning Schiff rather than to the bumbling and clueless Nadler and his Judiciary Committee, who has now all but blown up his inquiry in just its initial hours.

1) By stacking the witnesses 3–1 and ignoring Jonathan Turley, the Democrats only hyped the writ against them that they are biased and unfair. Worse still, the Republicans’ witness Turley, former Bush administration critic who had voted against Trump, came across as the far more disinterested. Could not the Democrats have found one pro-Trump professor who had soured on him and now favored impeachment? Does the self-described “snarky” Karlan have any common sense at all — or even an associate with common sense who might have warned her that her canned, preplanned smear of Barron Trump was not just boorish, but a public relations disaster?

2) We are reminded that, outside small captive audiences on campus, academics are not very good public speakers and usually argue on the basis of presumed authority rather than facts and analysis. The three partisans came across as nasal, whiney, emotional, biased, and self-referential — and their past anti-Trump tweets, and partisan careers, clips, and interviews only confirmed the current stereotypes. On Ukraine, they said the same old, same old thing in mostly the same old ways.

And the three came off like those talking academic heads in documentaries, who sometimes wish to make the most of their 2 minutes of fame by turning up the volume and animation. Turley, in contrast, is a cool veteran of televised news analysis. His op-eds are sober and judicious. And he is a skilled public debater, who knows how to keep calm and analytical. He quickly eviscerated the three with apologetic ease — and deferential smiles. So whose bright idea was it to allow three partisan mediocrities to gang up against Turley, whose  rapier thrusts are well known? Americans love underdog odds, but Turley didn’t even break a sweat in leaving gaping holes in almost every argument advanced by the experts and House panel. He may have given the best solo congressional witness performance in modern memory.

Presidential Misconduct: Some Historical Perspective By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-impeachment-hearings-presidential-misconduct-historical-perspective/

If you think Trump’s behavior is the worst in American history, you might be insane.

This week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee trotted out a trio of dispassionate legal experts to explain why the impeachment of Donald Trump was justified. They were there to bring a veneer of gravitas and erudition to what’s been, until now, a highly partisan affair.

But however smart people such as Michael Gerhardt, distinguished professor of constitutional law at University of North Carolina, might be, they aren’t immune from peddling partisan absurdities. Once Gerhardt argued that Trump’s conduct was “worse than the misconduct of any prior president,” we no longer had any intellectual obligation to take him seriously on the topic.

Because while I’m certainly not a distinguished professor, I am very confident that history began before 2016. Which means that, even if I concede Gerhardt’s framing of Trump’s actions — bribery, extortion, etc. — I can rattle off at least a dozen instances of presidential misconduct that are both morally and constitutionally “worse” than Trump’s blundering attempt to launch a self-serving Ukrainian investigation into his rival’s shady son.

Let’s ignore for a moment that American presidents have owned their fellow human beings, and focus instead on the fact that in 1942, the president of the United States signed an executive order that allowed him to unilaterally intern around 120,000 Americans citizens of Japanese descent. Not only was the policy deliberately racist, it amounted to a full-bore attack on about half the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold. Such an attack was a specialty of FDR’s, despite the all the hagiographies written about his imperial presidency.

Woodrow Wilson — who regularly said things like, “a Negro’s place is in the corn field” — didn’t merely re-segregate the civil service, personally firing more than a dozen supervisors for the sin of being black; he first pushed for, and then oversaw the enactment of, the Sedition Act. Wilson threw dissenters and political adversaries into prison, instructed the postmaster to refuse delivery of literature he deemed unpatriotic, and a created an unconstitutional civilian police force that targeted Americans for political dissent.

Despite Common Core Promises, U.S. Kids Repeat Poor Performance On Latest Global Test by Joy Pullman

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/05/despite-common-core-promises-u-s-kids-repeat-poor-performance-on-latest-global-test/
On Tuesday, the latest results from a respected international test showed U.S. students making no progress in math or reading in the past 19 years. It’s the latest puncture in Common Core’s inflated promises.

Add another set of test results to the stack deflating promises U.S. leaders said justified the major arm-twisting required to switch the nation to Common Core. On Tuesday, the latest results from a respected international test showed U.S. students making no progress in math or reading since the last such exam three years ago.

This trend of no improvement on math and reading has persisted since the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) began in 2000, although U.S. kids have improved in science on the exam, which is given to 15-year-olds. Common Core, a set of national curriculum, testing, and instruction mandates the Obama administration pressured states into beginning in 2009, dictates reading and math instruction, not science.

American kids were, predictably, the worst at math. In the latest results, just 8 percent of U.S. 15-year-olds rated of excellent proficiency in math, and 27 percent rated of poor proficiency. Both of these results were below the average of comparable students’ performance developed nations.

PISA is considered “is considered a barometer of future economic competitiveness,” as The Wall Street Journal notes, because students’ reading and especially math abilities are linked with their future earnings. Math achievement is a strong predictor of gross domestic product, according to a 2016 Harvard University study. Even small increases in average U.S. math achievement, the study found, could boost American’s incomes and productivity by trillions of dollars. This is just one of many opportunity costs of rushing headlong into unproven fancies like Common Core.

“The U.S. ranking improved in all three subjects to eighth in reading, 30th in math and 11th in science, when compared with 63 other educational systems that reported data in 2015 and 2018. But Ms. [Peggy] Carr[, a U.S. federal education official,] said the improved rankings are due to score changes with other education systems,” reported WSJ.

The less atrocious reading scores are thus not much cause for celebration. And the kids at the bottom were, as always, hit hardest. According to The New York Times, “About a fifth of American 15-year-olds scored so low on the PISA test that it appeared they had not mastered reading skills expected of a 10-year-old, according to Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the exam. Those students, he said, face ‘pretty grim prospects’ on the job market.”

“In the U.S., about 13.5% of students were good at distinguishing between fact and opinion on the reading exam,” WSJ reported. “Most countries have seen little improvement in scores over the past decade, despite increases in education spending, according to OECD.”
This Is Not an Outlier Result for the Common Core Era

It’s been a decade since President Obama announced federal grants in return for states jumping into Common Core before it was even written. Common Core didn’t move fully into place until about 2015, though, so we had to wait a while to see if its critics were right. But since then, just about all the evidence available has shown that at best Common Core has had none of the promised positive effects on student achievement, and likely includes demonstrable negative effects.

On the latest U.S. tests for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math, as I wrote in October, “For the third time in a row since Common Core was fully phased in nationwide, U.S. student test scores on the nation’s broadest and most respected test have dropped, a reversal of an upward trend between 1990 and 2015. Further, the class of 2019, the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, is the worst-prepared for college in 15 years, according to a new report.”

This spring, a federally funded study done by pro-Common Core researchers found, to their surprise, “that [Common Core] had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards, and had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of NAEP composite scores.”

“The study found not only lower student achievement since Common Core, but also performed data analysis suggesting students would have done better if Common Core had never existed. The achievement declines also grew worse over time,” I wrote this spring.

In 2018, we also saw declines among U.S. college entrance exam results:

ACT scores released earlier this month show that students’ math achievement is at a 20-year low. The latest English ACT scores are slightly down since 2007, and students’ readiness for college-level English was at its lowest level since ACT’s creators began measuring that item, in 2002. Students’ preparedness for college-level math is at its lowest point since 2004.

In 2017, I noted the achievement decline of American kids on another international test, this one about reading: “The decline was even more pronounced among the lowest-performing American students. On this test, U.S. students have made no statistically significant improvement since 2001. The 2016 slide is especially notable because 2016’s fourth graders have spent virtually their entire schooling inside public schools forced to shift their instruction to fit Common Core.”

In 2015, former U.S. Department of Education official Ze’ev Wurman discussed early warning signs on a raft of other important tests:

The recent 2015 NAEP [Nation’s Report Card national] results showed a first ever significant decline of 2-3 points – about a quarter of a grade-level worth – in mathematics at both grades 4 and 8, and in grade 4 reading. The decline was broad and deep in most states with just a handful of exceptions, and even formerly excellent states like Massachusetts were not immune. But NAEP scores are only the most recent sign of decline.

The ACT scores have been stagnant in the last couple of years, but they show a slight decline since 2009. The SAT scores stayed level since 2007, until they dropped this year on both verbal and math.

AP course taking in AB and BC calculus has been rising steadily over the years, yet the number of students who scored a passing grade this year – 3 and above – has plateaued in BC calculus and actually declined in AB calculus for many demographic groups.

We Were Scammed, America

In 2009, President Obama described Common Core as “higher and clearer standards and assessments that prepare a student to graduate from college and succeed in life.” He promised that his package of reforms centered on Common Core would “raise the quality of education from kindergarten through senior year” and that “America’s children, America’s economy, and America itself will be better for it.” Almost a decade later, the results are in, and the promises broken.

In 2010, Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan promised the nation that Common Core and it’s associated tests would be a “game-changer in K-12 education.”

“High standards and high expectations are the first step toward higher performance,” he assured a convention of newspaper editors in 2013, giving the example from Tennessee to support his contention that Common Core would reduce achievement gaps between the United States’ top and bottom students. The opposite has happened: On PISA, the latest National Assessment for Educational Progress, and other test results, the gap has only grown since Common Core.

It wasn’t just Democrats making these false promises about a generation of children and billions in taxpayer spending. Jeb Bush frequently described Common Core as “higher standards for reading and math” that were key to improving student achievement nationwide. Top Republicans like Senate Education Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, Mike Pence, Ronald Reagan Education Secretary Bill Bennett, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (now a U.S. senator), and numerous other GOP governors, publicly supported the initiative. The Wall Street Journal’s biggest editorial complaint early on appeared to be not that Obama’s education ideas like Common Core were unsupported by good evidence, but that he might not have enough leverage to get states deeply enough into them.

And then there were the dozens of special interest groups, largely flush with huge amounts of cash from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, paid to promote the idea. Michael Petrilli of the supposedly conservative Thomas Fordham Foundation is representative of this group. He went around to especially red legislatures telling, for example, Tennessee lawmakers when they had qualms about Common Core that ” the faithful implementation of these standards will help many more young people—including Tennesseans—be prepared for success in college and career.” False.

He told the Indiana legislature when it also had the same concerns, a “reason to stay the course with the Common Core—perhaps the most important reason—is to raise student achievement. I can’t guarantee that—it depends on aggressive implementation at the local level. But I can tell you that what you were doing before Common Core (and your raft of recent reforms) wasn’t working.” Well, we threw that spaghetti against the wall, and it failed to stick. Whoops!

All these people used their power to promote the idea that Common Core would be a good use of taxpayer funds and institutions and the next generation of American children. They were all wrong. And being wrong has cost them just about nothing. Petrilli’s next project, for example, is coediting a book out in 2020 and backed by more conservative foundation money titled “How to Educate an American: A Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools.” Bush still puts on big “education reform” conferences every year that bill plenty of the same education soothsayers whose prophecies have failed American kids. They’re underwritten by donors who apparently don’t look for a track record of success from the people they write huge checks to.

This failed project may not have put a dent in the careers of its biggest boosters, but Common Core has cost American children, and the nation, not only a huge amount of wasted time and money, but precious opportunities to actually achieve more, better, and faster. We’ve been scammed. Who will pay for the losses inflicted upon the nation by people who owed us a return on our investments and instead gambled it all away?

“Taxpayers and families deserve real results for their money,” Petrilli told the Wisconsin legislature reconsidering Common Core in 2013. Yes, yes we do.
Joy Pullmann (@JoyPullmann) is executive editor of The Federalist, mother of five children, and author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids.” She identifies as native American and gender natural. Her latest ebook is a list of more than 200 recommended classic books for children ages 3-7 and their parents.
Photo U.S. Air Force / public domain