As states began implementing the Common Core, a backlash began to brew, and it grew more ferocious by the day.

Amid the legitimate concerns expressed by parents, teachers and education experts, distortions and blatant falsehoods began to sprout and spread. Many of the criticisms are altogether unrelated to the standards but are freighted with themes from the Christian Right’s long-running battles over sex education, textbooks, school prayer, the teaching of evolution, LGBT issues, and secular teaching in general. Some of the claims are quite inflammatory, like the contention that children will be “sexualized” at a young age or “indoctrinated” into a “homosexual” lifestyle.

“We all expected and welcomed vigorous educational debate about the standards,” noted Carrie Heath Phillips of the Council of Chief State School Officers. “What surprised us was the people and organizations who’ve taken as their mission to continuously spew out these untruths.”

The most common falsehoods: The federal government is dictating a specific curriculum that schools must follow; school districts and states will lose local control; the standards force liberal political and anti-Christian dogma onto students; and testing associated with the standards is part of a government and big business plot to track personal information about students from kindergarten to adulthood.

None of this is true, insists Chester Finn of the Fordham Institute, which supports the standards. “There is no federal control,” he said. And, as for the Common Core enforcing political and anti-religious beliefs, “this is total paranoia.”

In 2013, the propaganda blitz worsened as the issue began to set the conservative grassroots ablaze.



Right-wing advocacy groups associated with billionaires David (top) and Charles Koch are fueling grassroots opposition to the Common Core.

Even as local and state groups associated with the Christian Right, the Tea Party and the antigovernment “Patriot” movement were springing into action, national groups were working hard to stir the pot. These included the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, which calls the Common Core the “next massive effort to further centralize education,” and the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which published a 20-page booklet and established a content-rich Web page for activists called “Fight the Common Core.” Homeschooling organizations, notably the Home School Legal Defense Association, also have been active.



The American Principles Project, founded by Princeton University Professor Robert George, echoes the conspiracy theories of the radical right, warning that the Common Core advances the “utopian, grandiose planning for a managed global economy.

Among those pushing the issue are advocacy groups associated with and funded by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialists who fund many conservative causes and candidates. Politico, the online news outlet, reported in January 2014 that a draft action plan by FreedomWorks lays out the following agenda: “First, mobilize to strike down the Common Core. Then push to expand school choice by offering parents tax credits or vouchers to help pay tuition at private and religious schools. Next, rally the troops to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Then it’s on to eliminating teacher tenure.”

The group’s director of grassroots activism, Whitney Neal, told Politico the group would kick off a “huge campaign” to “connect the dots” between killing the Common Core and other conservative priorities. She said a major march in Washington was being planned for this summer, perhaps with Glenn Beck.

Another Koch-backed group, Americans for Prosperity, is also pressing the issue in a series of town hall meetings across the country.

So what is the end game for the Kochs?

The 1980 Libertarian Party platform provides some perspective. David Koch ran for vice president on the party’s ticket that year, when its platform called for the “complete separation of education and State.” It went on: “Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.”

A principal agitator

The American Principles Project (APP) has been highly influential in galvanizing grassroots opposition across the country, in particular by producing videos, reports, websites and other materials that helped provide the intellectual framework for local organizers. The group says it is spending $500,000 to fight the Common Core.

The small, Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit was founded by Princeton University law professor Robert George, a constitutional scholar who is considered one of the leading thinkers of the Christian Right. George has also long been active in opposing LGBT equality. He was a founder of the National Organization for Marriage and he also helped found the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative think tank that granted almost $700,000 to professor Mark Regnerus for a 2012 study designed to help “prove” that LGBT people make bad parents (the study has been widely discredited). George also was a drafter of the Manhattan Declaration, a 4,500-word manifesto that debuted in 2009 in which Christians pledge to engage in civil disobedience against laws they believe violate their religious rights.

The APP is heavily involved in education issues, saying that it wants to promote parental authority and protect the “innocence of children” against such things as promiscuity, pornography, violence, and “other corruptions.” One of its projects, American Principles in Action, has led campaigns against teaching about LGBT people in schools and has worked against the repeal of the military’s anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.



Hoosiers Against the Common Core stages a rally at the Indiana Statehouse in April. Indiana became the first state to drop the standards after Gov. Mike Pence signed legislation ordering the state school board to draft new ones.

In 2012, the APP released a report, Controlling Education from the Top: Why Common Core is Bad for America, that portrays the standards as a federal takeover of education. The following year, in September 2013, the group co-sponsored an anti-Common Core conference at Notre Dame University, drawing more than 200 activists from states as diverse as California, Louisiana, Massachusetts and Michigan. It also has released numerous videos about the Common Core and has sent representatives to testify against implementing the program at several state legislative hearings. It regularly sends speakers to panel discussions and grassroots events around the country.

The APP materials appear, for the most part, to contain rather arcane critiques: the standards are mediocre, the costs to states will be too high, states will lose autonomy, etc. But in a video on the group’s website, APP Senior Fellow Jane Robbins warns of dark forces at work behind the scenes, in language echoing the conspiracy theories of Patriot groups. The standards, she says, are part of a “utopian, grandiose planning for a managed global economy” long sought by “progressives, or socialists as they have historically been known.” The Common Core is part of a “new vision” for America that advances “the model of a command economy and unlimited government.”

This theme is striking a chord with social conservatives who are being organized to fight the Common Core in their own states by national groups with state and local chapters.

One of the most active is Concerned Women for America (CWA), a group founded in 1979 by Beverly LaHaye, the wife of Timothy LaHaye, the evangelical minister and author of the Left Behind series of Christian novels. The CWA was founded to fight feminism but today seeks to “bring Biblical principles into all levels of public policy.” It has a big megaphone. According to Right Wing Watch, the group boasts more than 500,000 members in 500 chapters and a daily radio show that reaches more than 1 million people.

CWA’s Georgia chapter has been especially active, creating a website that serves as a key national clearinghouse for activists and links to other grassroots groups and websites.

Far-right ‘Patriots,’ Tea Parties take aim

Battles over education issues have been going on for many years but were mostly fought at the state and local level. In the Common Core, disparate elements of the far right found a unifying issue and a common punching bag—the federal government—even as the individual skirmishes are waged in the 44 states that are implementing the standards.

Various Tea Party factions, the John Birch Society and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, for example, all refer to the standards as “ObamaCore.”

Tea Party groups have spearheaded rallies against the Common Core in many states—Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin, to name just a few. They’ve also provided foot soldiers for the battles being waged in numerous states—packing buses to legislative hearings, bombarding lawmakers with phone calls and helping force legislative investigations of the Common Core.

Joining the Tea Party groups are Patriot activists who are part of a radical-right movement that has staged a dramatic resurgence since President Obama was elected. As these groups have become involved, the rhetoric has grown more extreme. Numerous coalitions fighting the Common Core include groups associated with the Christian Right, the Tea Parties and the Patriot movement.

Chief among the Patriot groups is the John Birch Society (JBS)—the ultra-right organization that once called President Dwight D. Eisenhower a communist agent. The JBS links the Common Core to an all-encompassing conspiracy theory involving Agenda 21, a non-binding U.N.-sponsored set of principles for sustainable development that was developed during the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and signed by President George H.W. Bush. The JBS believes Agenda 21 is part of a plot by a secretive cabal of global elites to institute a “New World Order,” a socialistic, totalitarian world government that will enslave Americans.

Mass-producing ‘green serfs’

In March, The New American, the JBS magazine, published an article under the headline “Common Core and UN Agenda 21: Mass Producing Green Global Serfs.” It claimed that the Common Core is part of a broader agenda “in the works for decades” to help usher in the New World Order, mainly by transforming American children into “‘global citizens’ ready for the coming ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ world order.” The article claims that UNESCO, Bill Gates, the Obama administration and “other powerful globalist forces are working quietly but fiendishly to impose global education standards on humanity.”

JBS affiliates also have been active in stoking fury at the Common Core.

For example, Freedom Project Education operates a Christian-oriented homeschooling website that bills itself as “independent.” But it turns out that Freedom Project Education is not so independent after all. It’s the educational arm of the American Opinion Foundation, an “independent” nonprofit associated with and created by the JBS. On the Freedom Project’s website, academic director Duke Pesta calls the Common Core an “absolute appropriation of Soviet ideology and propaganda.” Further, the site calls the standards “a Trojan Horse that mandated cooperation with ObamaCare.” Perhaps even worse, the “mainstreaming of homosexuality, promiscuity and other practices—even to young children—is an important component of the scheme.”

In case the government leaders don’t pick up the message, the JBS’s American Opinion Foundation is paying travel expenses for alleged education experts to testify against the Common Core in states like Wisconsin that have held investigative hearings on the standards.



Phyllis Schlafly

Phyllis Schlafly, who founded the Eagle Forum in 1972 to fight the feminist movement and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, also has found in the Common Core a new battlefield in the culture war. She has crusaded against it for three years through her columns, radio shows and Eagle Forum affiliates across the country. Sounding much like those in the Patriot movement, she claims it will bring this country a totalitarian government.

Other Eagle Forum leaders also wave the New World Order/Agenda 21 red flag. In an interview published on the Patriot website Renew America in March 2013, the president of Eagle Forum Palm Springs, Christina Michas, linked the Common Core to “the ultimate goal” of setting up “internment or re-education camps for those that will not comply with their sick agenda. You either are ‘retrained’ or you will have to be eliminated.”

Such talk refers to the false conspiracy theory, promoted by Patriot groups including the JBS, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is building concentration camps to imprison political dissidents.



David Barton

Last August, Schlafly wrote a letter to Catholic bishops warning them to stay away from the Common Core. She blasted the standards for “active promotion of gay marriage, and other federal efforts designed to dismantle moral society. … We cannot remain complacent as this administration takes aim at our children. … The laity needs to hear from the bishops on this issue.”

The letter was reprinted in Crisis, a lay Catholic magazine, under the heading “Common Core: A Threat to Catholic Education.” On the heels of Schlafly’s well-publicized letter and the APP’s Notre Dame conference in September, more than 100 Catholic professors signed a public letter to U.S. bishops in November denouncing the standards and urging bishops to ignore them or to reverse the decision in more than 100 dioceses where they were already approved.

The media amplifiers

Popular right-wing media figures such as former Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin, the syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor, have played key roles in spreading hysteria and stoking opposition to the standards. Beck sponsored two anti-Common Core strategizing conferences in 2013, appointing self-proclaimed historian David Barton to organize them. Barton is the founder of WallBuilders, a Texas-based, far-right evangelical group promoting his revisionist view that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that it ought to be ruled by biblical principles. Although he has no academic credentials in history, he has written numerous history books and has served as an adviser to Newt Gingrich, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee. His books have been widely discredited by historians for their factual errors and distortions. Barton’s most recent, The Jefferson Lies, was withdrawn from the market and recalled by the world’s largest Christian publisher in 2012 because it contained so many factual mistakes. That year, readers of the nonpartisan History News Network, affiliated with George Mason University, voted the book “least credible history book in print.”

But Barton continues to enthrall Christian Right audiences. Lately, he’s been spinning tall tales about the Common Core.

Beck’s conferences, moderated by Barton, drew activists from around the country with the goal of mapping out coordinated attacks on the Common Core. Beck calls it “the biggest story in American history. … It is Communism, we are dealing with evil.”



Glenn Beck, who sponsored two anti-Common Core strategizing conferences in 2013, calls the Common Core “evil.” Commentator Michelle Malkin claims “government meddlers” will gather “intimate data” on children and sell it to business interests.

On his website and BlazeTV Internet-based show, Beck has repeatedly railed against the standards, often in apocalyptic terms. “We will not save our country unless we save it first from this attack,” he said. The headlines on his site include: “Do Common Core’s roots date back to America’s earliest socialists?” and “Common Core: A Lesson Plan for Raising Up Compliant, Non-Thinking Citizens.”

The liberal plot

Malkin has written extensively on the Common Core, denouncing the “collectivist agitators” who have “chipped away at academic excellence in the name of fairness, diversity and social justice.” Much of what she writes purportedly reflects the views of education experts, whether accurate or not, who disagree with the standards. For example: “Traditional Euclidean geometry is replaced with an experimental approach that had not been previously pilot-tested in the U.S.” But the conclusions she draws are straight out of the Patriot conspiracy textbook: that it’s all a big liberal plot to indoctrinate children.

Malkin has also warned that, through the Common Core, “Washington meddlers … are gathering intimate data on children and families” that will be “sold by government officials to the highest bidders.” The data collection and selling, she claims, “is the central fraud of Washington’s top-down nationalized curricular scheme.” Malkin based her warning on the APP’s 2012 report, produced with the Massachusetts-based Pioneer Institute, which said the Common Core “is merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce.”