The Cost of Common Core

It may not work terribly well but Common Core sure is expensive. “The treatment of textbooks as mountains of words is one of the signature elements of Common Core,” Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) pointed out at the National Press Club on Monday.

During the past half-decade, the 26 states aligned with the Common Core has dropped to 7 but the price tag keeps increasing.  “The Pioneer Institute estimates that the 7-year cost of Common Core is $16 billion,” Silicon Valley engineer Ze’ev Wurman said at the same Press Club event where Wood spoke. “The pro-Common Core Fordham Institute puts the seven-year cost at $3-to-12 billion.”

“In California, which has a line-item in the budget for it, the three year cost has been $5.2 billion. The original estimate in California was $1.6 billion.”

Wurman worked in President George W. Bush’s Department of Education. By the way, both the Pioneer Institute and the Fordham Institute are right-of-center think tanks.

Wood and Wurman were in town at the Press Club for the book launch of Drilling Through The Core: Why Common Core is Bad for Education, published by the Pioneer Institute.  Despite the slow fade to irrelevance Common Core has experienced in K-12 education, quite a few institutions of higher learning have embraced it. “Three hundred colleges have accepted students with Common Core,” Wood noted. “What does that mean?”

“It means no more remedial education.”

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