Federal law forbids Washington from directing what American children are taught. Two private associations wrote the standards anyway, a foundation paid for them, and $4.35 billion bought the states’ consent. In 2015 Congress went back and outlawed the mechanism by name.
A Harvard historian walked into a Civil War seminar and discovered that most of the young scholars in the room could not read the handwriting in the original documents. Drew Gilpin Faust asked the fifteen students in her class about cursive after one of them explained that reproduced manuscripts were useless to him. About two-thirds could not read the script. More could not write it. Some had altered or abandoned research because handwritten sources stood between them and the record. The documents were still there. The education required to read them was gone.
Faust published that account in The Atlantic in October 2022. Her seminar is what a 2010 policy decision looked like twelve years on. That year the Common Core English Language Arts standards named digital production and keyboarding while imposing no national expectation that students learn to read or write cursive. By fourth grade, children were expected to type a page in a single sitting. Cursive received no corresponding place in the framework. No federal statute outlawed handwriting. The new system used a more efficient mechanism. It made keyboarding part of the measured architecture and left cursive outside it.
The standards nobody voted for
Common Core did not arise from an act of Congress establishing a national curriculum. It emerged through two private nonprofit associations. The National Governors Association represented governors. The Council of Chief State School Officers represented state superintendents. Their members were the same public officials who would later vote to adopt what the associations produced.
That structure was not incidental. It was the only structure available, because federal law forbids the direct route. The General Education Provisions Act, at 20 U.S.C. §1232a, bars any federal department, officer, or employee from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control” over the curriculum, the program of instruction, or the selection of textbooks in any school system. Section 103(b) of the Department of Education Organization Act repeats the prohibition almost word for word against the Secretary of Education specifically. Congress wrote that sentence twice because it meant it.
So the standards were never federal property. They are private property. The Common Core public license names the NGA Center and CCSSO the sole owners and developers of the standards and permits no claim to the contrary. Any state that publishes them must carry a 2010 copyright notice in the two associations’ names. The license terminates automatically upon breach. Disputes are routed to a court in the District of Columbia. A governor could sign. A legislature could appropriate. Neither owned the text.
The people who wrote it were not anonymous. David Coleman and Susan Pimentel led the English language arts work. Jason Zimba, William McCallum, and Phil Daro were central mathematics writers. Achieve supplied the earlier readiness model through the American Diploma Project. Student Achievement Partners, founded by Coleman, Pimentel, and Zimba, became the national interpretation center after the standards were released. The men who wrote the standards then staffed the organization that told the country what the standards meant.
Who paid
The Gates Foundation’s own grant records document the financing. A May 2008 grant of $2,127,420 went to the NGA Center for Best Practices for college-and-career readiness work. In July 2009, while Common Core was being drafted, Gates committed $9,961,842 to CCSSO for standards and assessments, data systems, and educator development. In December 2009, six months before the standards were published, Gates awarded $550,844 to Common Core Inc., a separate organization, to build English curriculum aligned to a framework that did not yet exist in final form.
The money continued after publication. Gates committed $4,042,920 to Student Achievement Partners in 2012 to help teachers implement the standards. A $2.8 million grant in 2015 funded a Core Advocates network intended to operate in more than 20 states and reach one million teachers. Later grants paid for publisher criteria, curriculum adoption tools, and instruments to measure whether a given classroom was aligned.
None of this requires speculation. It is published by the funder. The two associations that owned the standards were financed by the same philanthropy while they wrote them, and the authors then founded an organization that was paid millions more to define what faithful implementation looked like.
Washington supplied the accelerator
Arne Duncan’s Department of Education did not write Common Core. It supplied the leverage that converted a privately owned standards project into a near-national operating system. Race to the Top placed $4.35 billion on the table in the fiscal wreckage after 2008. States competed by committing to common college-and-career-ready standards, aligned assessments, longitudinal data systems, and teacher evaluation tied to test scores.
Forty-six states and the District of Columbia applied. The Department awarded roughly $4 billion across the first two rounds to eleven states and the District of Columbia, then added seven more states in December 2011. Federal scoring rewarded states that adopted qualifying common standards on an accelerated timetable and joined a common assessment consortium. The Department separately financed PARCC and Smarter Balanced to build the computer-based tests. The federal evaluation published in 2016 found that winning states reported using more of the promoted policies than states that applied and lost. It did not establish a corresponding improvement in student outcomes.
The adoption mechanism was unmistakable. Private associations developed the framework. Foundations financed institutional capacity. Federal money rewarded state compliance. Testing consortia converted standards into accountability. State agencies changed rules and procurement. Publishers produced aligned materials. Districts retrained teachers. Devices entered classrooms because the tests required them. Classroom time followed what the system measured.
Congress eventually said so in the United States Code. On December 10, 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act added 20 U.S.C. §7906a to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It bars any federal officer from conditioning or incentivizing a grant, a priority, a preference, or a waiver on a state’s adoption of “the Common Core State Standards developed under the Common Core State Standards Initiative.” Congress named the standards in statute and outlawed the exact instrument Race to the Top had used. It did so five years after the fact, and it applied to nobody retroactively. Executive Order 13791, signed April 26, 2017, ordered the Secretary to audit the Department’s own regulations and guidance against that section and the five prohibitions around it.
What the standards redefined
The official goal was college and career readiness in a globally competitive economy. The standards began with claims about what a graduate should know and worked backward into grade-level requirements. International benchmarking, employer expectations, and assessment compatibility became the governing filters. What could not be measured on a common test had no natural place in the design.
In English, the implementation network elevated complex text, evidence-based reading and writing, content-rich nonfiction, and keyboarding. Cursive had no common standard. Manuscript literacy had no national assessment. Memorization, recitation, and literary chronology had no implementation machine behind them.
In mathematics, the framework reorganized grade progressions around conceptual understanding, procedural skill, and application. The standards did not ban the arithmetic algorithms. The classroom transformation arrived through aligned textbooks, testing specifications, scripted lessons, and procurement lists. Parents encountered methods that bore little resemblance to the mathematics they had learned, because vendors and training contractors, not the standards, wrote the daily lesson.
Science followed through a separate but overlapping structure. Achieve coordinated the Next Generation Science Standards after the National Research Council produced A Framework for K-12 Science Education. The National Science Teaching Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and 26 lead states participated. Carnegie Corporation financed the framework and then the implementation infrastructure that carried it into classrooms.
The second layer
The academic architecture was later joined by social and emotional learning, equity frameworks, and global-citizenship education. CASEL’s framework, revised in November 2020, operates across classrooms, schools, homes, and communities, and connects its five competencies to identity, collective goals, and a more caring and just world. UNESCO calls for social and emotional learning to be mainstreamed across education systems. Its Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development operates under the mission statement Transforming Education for Humanity and ties SEL to global citizenship and the 2030 Agenda.
UNESCO did not write the 2010 Common Core standards. CASEL did not author the cursive omission. The link is not authorship. It is plumbing. The first reform built a national pipe: standards, state adoption machinery, teacher training, funding guidance, measurement, and scalable materials. Anything subsequently poured into that pipe reaches every classroom on the same schedule. The second layer did not have to build anything. It only had to be poured.
The outcome record
The reformers promised rigor, readiness, and equity. The official record does not show the academic breakthrough used to justify the overhaul. National Assessment of Educational Progress results released in January 2025 showed reading down two points at both fourth and eighth grade against 2022, steepening a three-point decline already recorded between 2019 and 2022. No state gained in reading at either grade. About 40 percent of fourth graders scored below NAEP Basic, the largest share since 2002. Roughly a third of eighth graders fell below Basic, the largest percentage ever recorded. Fourth-grade mathematics rose two points, the only gain in the release.
The September 2025 release closed the series. Twelfth-grade reading and mathematics each fell three points against 2019. Twelfth-grade reading now sits ten points below where it stood in 1992. Eighth-grade science fell four points, with 38 percent of students below Basic, the highest share since 2009. Matthew Soldner, then acting director of the Institute of Education Sciences, told reporters that scores for the lowest-performing students were at historic lows and that the slide had begun more than a decade earlier. His predecessor had warned of it. So had hers.
The international comparison runs the same direction. PISA 2022 recorded American mathematics performance among the lowest levels the United States had ever posted in that assessment, with 34 percent of American fifteen-year-olds classified as low performers and the country ranked 27th of 81. Reading and science stayed above the OECD average. The promise had not been to hold mediocrity in one subject while avoiding collapse in two others. The promise was international academic leadership.
The United States remains a world leader in research universities, advanced industry, and scientific production. That strength does not vindicate the K-12 architecture. It measures the distance between what the country can build and what it teaches. A nation capable of the world’s most advanced technologies has accepted classrooms where millions of children cannot read proficiently and where its best history students need an intermediary to read ordinary handwritten English.
The verdict
This was one of the largest public-private restructurings of American education in modern history. The network acquired standards, assessments, data systems, aligned curricula, device-dependent testing, and a durable market for contractors. It displaced local discretion without a vote in Congress for a national curriculum. It removed cursive from the common framework without publishing the record of who weighed the consequences.
The defense that Common Core never formally banned cursive answers the wrong question. Power works through incentives. What is named is trained. What is tested is funded. What is measured consumes the school day. Keyboarding entered the standard. Computer testing entered the grant. Data entered the accountability system. Cursive was left to survive on local memory and spare minutes.
The result is not modernization. It is dependency. A student who cannot read a handwritten letter cannot independently verify a transcription of it. A citizen who cannot read an original record must trust an archivist, a database, or a machine to say what it contains. The record can be public while its meaning stays out of reach.
The NGA Center for Best Practices, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Student Achievement Partners, and the Gates Foundation owe the public a complete account. Release the drafts. Publish the public-comment database. Identify every grant deliverable. Compare every state’s standards before adoption and after.
The repair has already started, and it started where the Constitution left the authority. On June 5, 2014, Governor Mary Fallin signed House Bill 3399, repealing Common Core in Oklahoma and returning English and mathematics to the state’s own pre-2010 standards while replacements were written. It passed 71 to 18 in the House and 31 to 10 in the Senate. Fallin was at that moment the sitting chair of the National Governors Association, one of the two organizations holding the copyright on the standards she was repealing. She had supported them. She signed anyway, citing the fear among citizens, parents, educators, and legislators that adopting Common Core “gives up local control of Oklahoma’s public schools.” Her own appointees to the state board of education sued to block the law. The Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld it that July.
Twelve years later the same instinct surfaced in a state that never repealed anything. In February 2026, Governor Josh Shapiro signed Act 2 of 2026, adding printing, joined italics, and cursive to Pennsylvania’s school code. Representative Dane Watro and Senator Wayne Langerholc carried the bill, and it cleared the Senate 42 to 5 with nineteen Democrats voting yes. Roughly two dozen states now require cursive instruction by law or by state standard. No foundation financed that campaign. No consortium designed it. Legislatures did it, one at a time, because parents asked them to.
America did not become powerful because children were trained to satisfy a data architecture. It became powerful because generations learned to read deeply, calculate accurately, study the natural world, preserve memory, and govern themselves. A free people cannot outsource the reading of their own history. They cannot surrender the education of their children to a permanent network of foundations, nonprofits, and contractors. The classroom belongs to the family, the teacher, the community, and the citizen. It is time to take it back.
Mel K is a writer, host, and producer focused on news, analysis & geopolitical forces shaping our world. She is the host of The Mel K Show, author of Americans Anonymous and her new book Infiltration Instead of Invasion, America Betrayed 1944-1954.
Any views expressed within the following article are solely those of the author and are not a direct reflection of any official stance of the organization, its publishers, or its affiliates.
