The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids.

• Author: Stotsky, Sandra
• Position: Book review

The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids

By Joy Pullmann

New York: Encounter Books, 2017.

Pp. 252. $25.99 paperback.

Libraries cannot set out politically balanced displays of books on the Common Core project because advocates and critics of it are far from evenly distributed. Most books on the subject do not consider the project a desirable reform (i.e., they do not favor workforce preparation for all students in place of optional high school curricula and student-selected postsecondary goals). Nor have parents lauded Common Core's effects on their children's learning or the K-8 curriculum. Indeed, few observers see anything academically worthwhile in the standards funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and promoted by the organizations and foundations it has subsidized for that purpose (e.g., the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Jeb Bush's Foundation for Educational Excellence), with aligned tests funded by the Obama-led U.S. Department of Education (USED) and guided by Arne Duncan's and John King's many appointees still in the USED, despite the change in administration after January 2017.

Joy Pullmann's book The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids is the most recent addition to the critics' side of the Common Core shelf, joining such critiques as Orlean Koehl's The Hidden C's of Common Core (Lake Dallas, Tex.: Helm, 2012); Terrence Moore's The Story-Killers: A Common-Sense Case against the Common Core (self-published, 2013); Patrick Wood's Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (Mesa, Ariz.: Coherent Press, 2014); Brad McQueen's The Cult of Common Core: Obama's Final Solution for Tour Child's Mind and Our Country's Exceptionalism (self-published, 2014); Kirsten Lombard's Common Ground on Common Core (Madison, Wise.: Resounding Books, 2014); Glenn Beck and Kyle Olson's Conform: Exposing the Truth about Common Core and Public Education (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015); Donna Hearn's The Long War and Common Core(St. Louis: Freedom Basics Press, 2015); and the Pioneer Institute's Drilling through the Core: Why Common Core Is Bad for America (Boston: Pioneer Institute, 2015).

The relative obscurity of most of these sources, including those that were self- published, shows that the topic is not being well addressed, if at all, by "mainstream" journalists, academics, or publishers. Maybe Common...