Dave Weigel points today to a perfect distillation of one of the most important political dynamics in Washington DC right now:
Not everybody wants Obama to notice them. Advocates for Common Core standards — which guide guide math and language arts instruction from kindergarten through high school — would rather the president take a pass.
Common Core was developed by associations of state officials and nonprofit groups. But once Obama embraced it and had given states financial and policy incentives to adopt it, it immediately sparked a backlash….“It’s imperative that the president not say anything about the Common Core State Standards,” said Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “For two years running, he’s taken credit for the adoption of these standards, which has only fueled critics on the right who see this effort as a way for the federal government to take over control of the schools.
“If he cares more about the success of this initiative than credit-taking, he will skip over it.”
There you have it. If Obama’s for it, tea partiers are against it. It doesn’t really matter whose idea it was in the first place.
