Jeffrey MacMillan for The Washington Post
My Post colleague Lyndsey Layton has written an illuminating story about the role Bill Gates and his money played in the Common Core State Standards initiative and its adoption by 45 states and the District of Columbia. In great detail, she explains how on one summer day in 2008, two men — Gene Wilhoit, then-director of the Council for Chief State School Officers, and David Coleman, at the time an educational consultant and an “emerging evangelist for the standards movement” — persuaded Gates to fund the creation and marketing of what became the Common Core.
The article makes a few things clear if they weren’t before:
*The Core wasn’t Gates’s idea, but his willingness to underwrite the effort — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — made it happen. Perhaps another billionaire might have done the same thing had Gates declined, but it wasn’t necessary for Wilhoit and Coleman to look for other funding.