The raucous Common Core debates of recent months have distracted many conservatives from their primary mission in the education wars: ensuring that every state and district in the land moves forcefully to raise academic standards, hold schools and educators (as well as students) to account for their performance, provide sound education choices to every family (including those with gifted or disabled youngsters), and squeeze more bang from every taxpayer buck that pours into primary and secondary education.
That quartet of reforms can have an immense and positive effect on the lives that our children and grandchildren will lead, on the vitality of our communities, and on the prosperity and security of the nation. And deciding whether and how to undertake them is — and always has been — the work of state and local officials. For too long, the Common Core has been a wedge between conservatives who agree on just about everything else when it comes to education policy, and a distraction from advancing these reforms.
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