Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute highlighted the small-government conservatives and libertarians in one camp, as well as the progressives in another in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller. Both groups dislike connecting standards to testing and teacher assessments and are bristling at federal intrusion on a new scale.
They are increasingly pushing back against “establishment” types in both political parties. Although these two camps rarely work together, McCluskey sees signs that this may be about to change.
The Common Core standards are “almost an establishment versus regular people, you’d almost say, dispute,” McCluskey said.
“There are a lot of people who think somebody — and they won’t usually say the federal government, but they’re the only entity that has the power to do what they want — somebody needs to be engineering the education system to produce workers that these people think will be needed in the future,” he explained.
Elites will often say “need a public schooling system that primarily produces people to work in factories, [that] produces a small number of people to be the leaders of society,” McCluskey continued.