Steve Lonegan's attack on our national educational standards is nothing more than the usual crazy-talk about leftist indoctrination — the federal conspiracy "to take over the control of our children's minds."

This is exactly why we need to teach critical thinking. It is Lonegan, and not the Common Core standards, who is dumbing down education. Moments like this are why it’s hard to take him seriously as a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate.

Let’s start with this idea of a federal plot. While President Obama encouraged states to adopt the Common Core standards, he didn’t create them. They were written by a nonpartisan group of educators, led by the nation’s governors and state schools chiefs, starting well before he took office. Not to brainwash children. To have a rigorous national standard that will make American students competitive with their international peers, who have passed the United States in several world rankings.

Common Core is voluntary, and has since been endorsed by 45 states, the major teachers’ unions and right-of-center think tanks such as the Fordham and Manhattan institutes. So Gov. Chris Christie is far from alone when he defends it against “knee-jerk” extremists in his own party.

It isn’t even a curriculum. It requires no specific textbooks, facts or reading material to be taught — with the exception of a little Shakespeare and America’s founding documents. Common Core simply gives a general outline of what students should be learning in each grade to stay on course for college. Because for too long, states had completely different standards, which made it hard for a kid who moved to another state to pick up where he or she left off.

It describes a sequence of skills to develop, such as reading and understanding a complicated text, or recognizing and solving a problem, and leaves it up to states how to teach them. Certainly, we should pay close attention to how Common Core is implemented, which is why New Jersey has new field testing planned for this spring. We don’t want to encourage mindless teaching to the test.

But neither do we want New Jersey added to the handful of states in which paranoid politicians and fringe groups are pushing to quash this reform outright, rather than finding ways to improve it.

Our nation needs a core set of educational standards. And we cannot let that be derailed by tea partiers with wide-eyed conspiracy theories, or left-wingers who don’t want standards or tests of any kind.

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