Common Core backers acknowledge that they didn’t do things right the first time around. | REUTERS The Common Core money war

One of the most expensive political fights in America this year isn’t over a Senate seat or a governor’s mansion. It’s about what your kids learn in school.

Tens of millions of dollars are pouring into the battle over the Common Core academic standards, which aim to set a course for students’ progression in math and language arts from kindergarten through 12th grade.


The proponents would appear to have all the advantages. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation already has pumped more than $160 million into developing and promoting the Common Core, including $10 million just in the past few months, and it’s getting set to announce up to $4 million in new grants to keep the advocacy cranking. Corporate sponsors are pitching in, too. Dozens of the nation’s top CEOs will meet today to set the plans for a national advertising blitz that may include TV, radio and print.

Opponents, meanwhile, project an image of scrappy grassroots gumption: One rancher in Alabama said he would sell off a cow to cover the costs of an anti-Common Core town hall. But they’re backed by an array of organizations with multimillion dollar budgets of their own and much experience in mobilizing crowds and lobbying lawmakers, including The Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Pioneer Institute, Concerned Women for America and FreedomWorks.

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The think tanks and advocacy groups fighting the Common Core are supported by some of the wealthiest and most politically savvy conservative donors in the U.S., including the Pope, DeVos and Scaife families, according to tax records and annual reports. A spokeswoman for the Charles Koch Foundation said it hasn’t made any grants specifically aimed at the Common Core, but tax documents show the Koch brothers have supported many of the advocacy groups working against the standards.

Those groups have circulated talking points, organized online petitions, linked up activists and convened anti-Common Core conferences, like a recent event at the University of Notre Dame that attracted more than 200 people from as far off as Louisiana, Florida and North Carolina to learn how the standards are “ruining America’s future.” The opposition even has its own communications team, Shirley & Banister Public Affairs, which has represented a star-studded list of conservative clients including the National Rifle Association, McCain 2008 and Club for Growth and is now working for the American Principles Project, an advocacy group opposing the Common Core.

Proponents “were lulled into thinking this was a no-brainer, a done deal … but opponents got themselves organized and funded,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a supporter of the standards. Now, he said, it’s war — and this fall will be like “the opening of a second front.”

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The battle lines defy neat partisan categories: Teachers unions have joined hands with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the Obama administration in promoting the standards, which nearly every state has adopted. On the other side, the Democratic Progressive Caucus of Florida finds itself on the same team as tea party activists.

The Common Core didn’t seem this controversial when the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers got together in 2009 to begin mapping out rigorous academic goals that schools from California to Maine could get behind. Backed by Gates grants, the groups wrote detailed standards for instruction in every grade, spelling out, for instance, that a first grader should be able to solve word problems requiring basic addition and subtraction and a 10th grader should be skilled at analyzing complex characters from literature.

The Obama administration gave states financial and policy incentives to adopt the standards and 45 of them and D.C. quickly did, with little public debate.

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But the honeymoon didn’t last long. Objections from left and right soon began mounting: The standards focused too heavily on nonfiction; they demanded too much of young children; they would lead to an explosion in testing; they would allow the federal government to take control of local classrooms. Fed by social media, the opposition quickly gained force.

“It’s hard to argue that Common Core proponents haven’t been caught flat-footed,” said Andrew Rotherham, a co-founder of Bellwether Education, a consulting firm that has worked for groups backing the standards. “There was this overconfidence that the time had come… They forgot that in a democracy, you have to do the nitty-gritty work of persuading people.”

Common Core backers acknowledge that they didn’t do things right the first time around. Bill Raabe, a union leader at the National Education Association, said he wouldn’t use the word “failure,” but would “clearly say that everyone … has learned a lesson.”

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It’s less clear if proponents know how to make up lost ground.

They have tried mightily, but with little success, to win over Christian conservatives. David Coleman, the liberal Jewish academic who is often described as the architect of the Common Core, held a two-day symposium for a dozen Christian educators and writers at Wheaton College in Illinois this spring. (The event was organized by Mark Rodgers, longtime chief of staff to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, whose firm — which counts the boy band Jonas Brothers among its clients — was under contract as a consultant to the Gates Foundation.)

Coleman swayed some participants with his argument that the Common Core would teach children how to read texts closely, which could help them understand Scripture. But other Christian leaders remain unconvinced; the Family Research Council, an influential religious-right group, is sponsoring a lecture on the dangers of the Common Core next week.

“I just fundamentally don’t believe in using centralized government standards,” said Michael Farris, who runs the Home School Legal Defense Association. Farris didn’t attend the Wheaton College event but later took a private call from Coleman that lasted an hour, he said, and went over much of the same ground.

Pro-core events planned for this fall are focused on persuading parents. Proponents are developing four 30-minute films that will feature footage of teachers using the new standards and will air on public television in Georgia. Unions are encouraging teachers to organize town halls. Change the Equation, an association of dozens of major tech companies, is even urging its members to use their corporate intranets to push out pro-core messages to employees, many of whom are parents of school-age kids.

Yet backers of the standards acknowledge that it isn’t easy to find an effective messenger.

Every time Education Secretary Arne Duncan promotes the standards, he risks reinforcing the fear on the right that the Common Core represents a federal takeover of local schools. The Business Roundtable has enlisted CEOs to defend the core in 11 states from Colorado to Georgia to Tennessee, but is keenly aware that the best messengers for the standards often are teachers, said Dane Linn, vice president of the Roundtable. Yet teachers face a backlash, too: When the staff at a Huntsville, Ala. elementary school passed out fliers supportive of the Common Core at an open house, some angry parents complained.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has spoken out often in favor of the Common Core but with limited influence over his party. As on other issues, there’s a deep wedge between establishment Republicans, who generally support the standards, and tea party insurgents, who decry them as sellouts. The Republican National Committee embraced the tea party view this spring when it adopted a resolution calling the standards “a nationwide straitjacket on academic freedom and achievement.”

Promoting the standards requires such a delicate balance that the Maryland Business Roundtable is seeking to write up scripts for a PR campaign that won’t use the word “standards.” Or “common.” Or “core.” The group is hoping to get sports stars to make the pitch, executive director June Streckfus said.

As for opponents, what they lack in Gates Foundation cash, they make up for in volume.

The campaign against the Common Core in many ways parallels the movement to derail President Barack Obama’s health care legislation: Some tea party groups have even taken to calling the academic standards “ObamaCore” in a derogatory echo of “Obamacare.”

Mobilizing on social media, activists pack school board meetings to protest the standards. They bombard state legislators with demands for public hearings. There have been Twitter rallies and physical rallies, too, in cities as diverse as Augusta, Maine; Raleigh, N.C.; and Port Jefferson Station, N.Y., where more than 1,500 parents, teachers and students marched around the high school football field on a summer afternoon, brandishing signs proclaiming “Common Core Hurts Children.”

“The more people learn about this, the more they come out against it,” said Bob Luebke, senior policy analyst with the Civitas Institute, a conservative advocacy group in North Carolina.

Academics at Stanford and the University of Arkansas have offered scholarly critiques of the standards. But the opposition is also fertile ground for wild rumors: That the Common Core bans the teaching of cursive so future generations won’t be able to read the Declaration of Independence; that the standards require schools to monitor kids through iris scans or biometric bracelets; that teachers will be forced to introduce pornography under the guise of reading instruction.

Ominous videos circulate online describing the academic standards as attacks on American freedoms and warning that Obama is following in the footsteps of Hitler or doing the bidding of the United Nations.

Emotions are so high that last month, the Madison County Republican Party in Alabama voted to censure a state school board member because she refused to take up the fight against the Common Core. The party condemned her for “dereliction of duty.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story gave the incorrect name of Concerned Women for America.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Nick Gass @ 09/20/2013 07:00 PM CORRECTION: A previous version of this story gave the incorrect name of Concerned Women for America.