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Radical Influences on the Creation of Common Core: Bill Ayers and Linda Darling-Hammond In October 2009 the Renaissance Group, a consortium of schools of education based at approximately 30 mid-sized universities across the United States, sponsored a three-day conference in Washington, DC that examined how issues of poverty, diversity, and multiculturalism affected the educational experiences of nonwhite children—and how white teachers were allegedly incapable of dealing effectively with those issues. At this conference, Nevin Brown of Achieve, Inc. made a presentation on the “Common Core State Standards” Initiative. Aside from Brown, the Renaissance Group conference featured three keynote speakers: (a) U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (appointed by President Barack Obama); (b) U.S. Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter (also appointed by Obama); and (c) Bill Ayers, the communist revolutionary, former Weather Underground terrorist, and longtime political ally of Barack Obama. What Ayers spoke about at this conference was never publicly revealed, but his participation as a keynoter clearly indicates that his opinions were given considerable weight. Moreover, there is little reason to believe that Ayers’s views on education were at odds, in any significant way, with those of Achieve, Inc.—a leading force in the creation of the Common Core State Standards. As Georgia college professor Mary Grabar writes, “If Achieve [Inc.] has ever disavowed Ayers or his teaching methods, we could find no evidence of this on the public record.” Highly noteworthy, at that time, were Ayers’s close ties to the radical left-wing educator Linda Darling-Hammond, who, that same year, spoke hopefully about the Obama Administration’s golden “opportunity” to effectuate “a set of ambitious plans to transform American education on a scale not seen since the days of the Great Society.” Further, Darling-Hammond was poised to become the assessment creator for the soon-to-be-unveiled Common Core State Standards. Today she is in charge of content specifications at the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), which has received at least $176 million in federal funds to develop tests on Common Core benchmarks. Moreover, Darling-Hammond is a member of the Governing Board of the Alliance for Excellent Education, Inc., which received a $500,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation “to advocate for high-school reform at the federal level in order to educate federal policy members about Common Core standards.” Prior to her work with Common Core, Darling-Hammond served as education advisor to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and then as education director for Obama’s White House transition team. She also has been a board member of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), a University of Illinois-based group that focuses, as Mary Grabar puts it, on “making students global citizens.” In addition, Darling-Hammond is a longtime advisory board member with the National Equity Project, (NEP, formerly known as the Bay Area Coalition of Essential Schools), an organization whose activities are rooted in the premise that urban, nonwhite children “have been historically underserved by their schools and districts”—notwithstanding the fact that those schools typically siphon up more taxpayer dollars than do their counterparts anywhere else on earth. NEP’s perspective is entirely consistent with Darling-Hammond’s contention that American society, racist to its core, is replete with “white privilege.” And to combat that perceived injustice, Darling-Hammond calls for the repayment of what she terms “an education debt” that America owes to black people—a view that was also espoused by the late Derrick Bell, godfather of Critical Race Theory. Darling-Hammond once published some of her work in a collection edited by Bill Ayers, who in 2009 stated that she (Darling-Hammond) was the singular individual best qualified for the post of U.S. Secretary of Education—though President Obama did not nominate her. Both Darling-Hammond and Ayers are leaders in the so-called Small Schools Movement (SSM), which Ayers himself created in collaboration with the hardcore communist Mike Klonsky. The SSM not only calls for schools to limit the size of their student bodies as much as possible, but also pushes pupils to tackle specific political themes such as “issues of inequity, war, and violence.” A leading objective of the SSM is to teach young people that American capitalism is a racist, materialistic doctrine that is inherently antithetical to “social justice” and has done incalculable harm to societies all over the world. Moreover, the SSM pushes for the implementation of a “meaningful curriculum” that emphasizes “critical learning” over “memorization and rote learning”—an emphasis shared by Common Core. It is noteworthy that neither Ayers nor Darling-Hammond have had success in improving students’ academic achievement or test scores. Darling-Hammond, for her part, created the Stanford New Schools, which targeted low-income Hispanic and black students and ranked in the lowest-achieving 5% of all schools in California. Meanwhile, Ayers’s Chicago Annenberg Challenge was a 1990s initiative that provided major funding for the Small Schools Movement. The American Thinker notes that because the Chicago Annenberg Challenge focused so heavily on the radicalization, rather than on the education, of students, it “failed to produce any measurable academic gains, according to [its] own final report.” https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/other/common-core/