Tennessee is considering a delay to Common Core implementation. | AP Photo/The Tennessean Common Core: Business vs. tea party

Tea party activists have been waging war for months against the Common Core academic standards. Now, in a coordinated show of muscle, Big Business is fighting back — and notching wins.

The urgent effort stems from a sense among supporters that this is a make-or-break moment for the Common Core, which is under siege all over the country.


A coalition including the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will launch a national advertising blitz Sunday targeted at Republicans skeptical about the standards. Spots promoting the Common Core will air on Fox News and other conservative outlets.

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The campaign — a major ad buy that could last months — aims to undercut dire tea party warnings that the standards amount to a federal power grab, akin to Obamacare. The TV spots and online ads will project a positive tone, featuring teachers praising the Common Core.

In a parallel effort unfolding mostly in deep red states, thousands of small-business owners and corporate executives have been bombarding state lawmakers with emails, calls and personal visits to press the point that better standards will mean a better workforce and ultimately, a better economy. They’ve been joined in some states by military officers who argue that not just the economy, but national security is at stake.

The strategy: Give conservatives reasons to support the Common Core — and make clear they will reap dividends if they do.

“We’re telling the legislature that this is our No. 1 issue,” said Todd Sanders, CEO of the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce. “We will be watching.”

The tea party might be loud, but the chamber spends tens of thousands on local campaigns each election year. Sanders wants lawmakers to remember that. “They are going to have to make a choice in terms of which constituency is going to be the most important to them,” he said. He said the chamber will have no qualms about dispensing its political funds to reward standards supporters, or punish dissenters. “My board is absolutely unanimous about this,” Sanders said.

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The business coalitions, working with allies from the education community, have scored some key victories in recent weeks. They blocked a bill that could have torpedoed the Common Core in Georgia. They derailed a similar bill in Arizona, too, though that fight is not yet over. They slowed a breakneck drive to get alternative standards approved in Indiana. And they blocked a bill in Wisconsin that would have empowered the legislature to shape new standards.

“It feels like there’s a bit of a momentum shift,” said Cheryl Oldham, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

Still, she and others are careful not to project overconfidence.

Within days, Indiana will very likely become the first state to officially scrap the standards, though it is far from clear that they will be replaced with anything too radically different. Bills to undermine the Common Core are pending in at least a half-dozen other states as well. Major conservative organizations such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity have jumped in to help guide and grow the grass-roots opposition. And teacher unions, though they still back the standards in concept, are warning that their implementation has been badly botched.

“It’s a critical time,” said Dane Linn, vice president of the Business Roundtable and one of the architects of the Common Core. “State leaders, and the general public, need to understand why employers care about the Common Core.”

The Business Roundtable, he said, is urging members to work their connections with “governors, committee chairs, House speakers, presidents of Senates” to stop any bills that could undercut the standards.

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Tea party activists are not intimidated.

On the contrary, they’re convinced the business community’s tactics will backfire by stoking populist outrage against the Common Core and its raft of powerful, establishment supporters. “Frankly, they can rant and rave as much as they want. They’re not going to affect me, and I don’t think they’re going to affect any others,” Arizona state Sen. Al Melvin said. “I’m a businessman. But sometimes, these chambers of commerce get it wrong.”

The Common Core State Standards, meant to guide K-12 instruction in math and language arts, were written by nonprofit education advocacy groups with input from state associations and funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Obama administration gave states substantial incentives to adopt the standards in 2010. Most quickly did, often with little public debate.

From the start, Big Business has supported the Common Core on the grounds that more rigorous standards would better prepare students for the 21st-century workforce. The military has backed the standards, too, in the hopes that better schools will produce more teens who can pass the basic aptitude test required at enlistment. But with the notable exception of an ExxonMobil ad campaign, that support has been mostly low-key and pro forma. Until now.

New Hampshire business groups are hosting a forum Friday called “Common Core/Common Misperceptions.” Arizona business leaders sponsored a similar event last week: It drew an audience of about 300. Connecticut business leaders joined educators at the statehouse this week to call for support of standards.

And in Georgia, the chamber helped launch a snazzy new pro-Common Core website — and brought 61 supporters to testify at a marathon hearing in the House.

The moves further align the business community with the Obama administration on education policy. Business leaders have also been aggressive in supporting Obama’s push to expand prekindergarten.

The stepped-up efforts come at a time when popular support for the Common Core — never very strong — is faltering.

A new national poll to be released this week looks like a win for standards supporters at first blush: Some 40 percent of registered voters are favorably disposed to the standards while just 25 percent are opposed. (The rest didn’t venture an opinion.)

But drill deeper and troubling trends emerge for Common Core backers.

Nearly four in 10 voters still know “nothing at all” about the Common Core, according to the poll, commissioned by Achieve Inc., which helped write the standards. Those who are aware of the Common Core tilt toward opposing it: 40 percent view the standards unfavorably, while 37 percent back them.

That’s a sharp reversal from Achieve’s last national poll, in May 2012, when those aware of the standards tended to like them, with “favorable” beating “unfavorable” by a solid margin of 42 percent to 28 percent.

In the newly released survey, taken last November, pollsters read aloud a paragraph noting that the standards are already being implemented across the nation and describing them as state-driven and educator-drafted. After hearing that description, 69 percent of voters said they would like to see the Common Core implemented. That sounds impressive — but it actually suggests a softening of support. In the 2012 poll, a shorter, more neutral description was read aloud and a higher proportion of voters — 77 percent – responded favorably.

The public wariness is understandable, given the relentless campaign opponents have waged, said Sandy Boyd, chief operating officer of Achieve.

Twitter and Facebook pulse with outraged posts from parents who blame the Common Core for saddling their children with incomprehensible homework, poorly written textbooks and nonsensical approaches to teaching basic concepts like double-digit subtraction. A good number of the offending textbooks and workbooks in fact have nothing to do with the Common Core — but the anecdotes stir frustration, even fury, among parents.

Tea party activists, meanwhile, stoke anxiety about the loss of local control over education. Liberals opposed to the standards raise fears about over-testing and violations of student privacy.

“You certainly hear more from the opponents,” Boyd said. “It’s important for people who support the Common Core to be more vocal.”

Though the business community has been notably reluctant to spend money this spring fighting tea party candidates in primaries, it has had no qualms about going toe-to-toe with the far right on the Common Core.

So it was that Billy Canary, president of the Business Council of Alabama, got four dozen influential executives on a conference call with the state senate leadership the other day to talk up the standards. He has also nudged hundreds of less prominent business leaders to reach out to their representatives in a campaign he calls “No lawmaker goes uncontacted.” If he senses a politician wavering on Common Core, he texts his pinstriped army. They spring at once into action.

Canary’s talking points might not win over parents who think of their children as precious individuals rather than workforce widgets, but they’re carefully calibrated to appeal to lawmakers concerned about economic development.

“The business community is by far the biggest consumer of the product created by our education system,” Canary tells them — and that system needs to produce better product if businesses are to compete in the global economy. “That’s why,” he said, “we’re all fighting in this direction.”