Editor:

The Wednesday, Nov. 6 issue of The Daily Evergreen featured an opinion piece titled “Common Core politics.” Politics is all this opinion is: Mitch Strang’s use of neo-conservative sources swings what could have been a thoughtful analysis of the issues and pitfalls in creating nationwide educational standards over to a conservative blog rehash of education curriculum.

The author might have looked at the Common Core website or interviewed one of our many education specialists at WSU on what they saw as the issues, good and bad, when setting nationwide education standards.

Instead, the reader is treated to the neo-conservative sites the National Review Online, a more conservative arm of the right-leaning National Review, and the American Thinker. These sources, when taken as objective factual information, taint the objectivity of the work, and by making bedfellows with neo-conservative sources the column furthers their political agenda.

The author predicts that Common Core will have the same “dumbing down effect” as No Child Left Behind — yet he does not mention the paucity of criticism from the aforementioned sites of NCLB. In fact, an article on the National Review Online, “No Child Left Behind, Ten Years Later” praises the vast amount of data gathered under that law.

As a teaching assistant in the history department, I encourage my students to be aware of and find source bias and to present information with even-handedness.

I encourage the author to do the same in the future.

Robert Franklin

Department of History

M.A. Candidate – Public History

-The opinions expressed in these letters to the editor are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of Student Publications.