Common Core: Show Me the Money

It turns out that Common Core’s creators might be demonstrating the same ethos Cuba Gooding’s character demonstrated in the film Jerry Maguire when he said, “Show me the money.”

“An undercover journalist for a nonprofit organization captured candid video of a national textbook company’s sales executive making inflammatory remarks about federal Common Core standards and textbook companies’ support of them,” Andrea Dillon reported in School Reform News, which is published by the Heartland Institute. “Project Veritas, a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to ‘investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct,’ interviewed now-former Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Accounts Manager Dianne Barrow about why educational publishing companies generally support the federal education standards.”

“’You don’t think that the educational publishing companies are in it for the education, do you?’ Barrow said in the recording. ‘It’s all about the money. What are you, crazy? It’s all about the money.’”

“’I hate kids,’ Barrow said later in the video. ‘I’m in it to sell books. Don’t even kid yourself for a heartbeat.’”

Project Veritas is the undercover journalism unit run by James O’Keefe. “James O’Keefe’s undercover videos reveal what activists have been saying for years: Common Core is a set of standards written not for the benefit of students, but to enrich crony capitalists, such as mega-curriculum companies, Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, Pearson, and National Geographic Education,” Hamilton Institute fellow Mary Grabar wrote in a column which we posted last month.

Photo by WWYD?

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