Curiouser and curiouser...

This phrase from the Lewis Carroll classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland could apply just as easily to the response 2016 presidential candidate and former Arkansas Governor provided to a question posed to him by our founder and editor-in-chief, Kirsten Lombard, at the Honest Candidate Assessment Summitt in Waterloo, IA, on October 24th. 

Huckabee's record on the Common Core State Standards has been mixed at best, earning him no better than a C on the recent report card issued by the Pulse to candidates on the matter of Common Core. The Pulse is a project of American Principles in Action.

The question Kirsten posed to the former governor concerned the relationship of Common Core to economic and workforce development and what the Governor planned to do to roll back managed economic systems that, in fact, have given birth to Common Core and related false education reforms.

Not only did the governor fail to answer the question actually asked of him, a good deal of what he did say should raise eyebrows. He, in fact, seems to laud Achieve, Inc, whose fingers are all over much of the bad that has arisen in education since its founding. In fact, Achieve proudly touts itself as the voice of what education experts and activists have now clearly identified as a more than dubious college- and career-ready movement in the United States.

Just as troublingly, Huckabee holds up the National Governors Association (NGA) as a worthy best-practices organization for education--one that could be leveraged upon the marginalization or dissolution of the U.S. Department of Education. 

Really...?

Did he actually hold up the NGA as a trustworthy avenue for providing resources and best practices...?

Yup. He did. He pointed straight to the private trade organization, one of two holders of the copyright on Common Core. Never mind that, aside from its corrupt involvement in education policy, the NGA has been a major proponent of the broader economic and workforce development policies into which Common Core so neatly fits.

Managed economy has a long history in this world, and it's safe to say there are an awful lot of blemishes to which one can point. Certainly, treating children as raw material and production output is not exactly a shining example of a society that's particularly voluntary or free. We'll leave it at that for the moment.

So, is Governor Huckabee uninformed or unprincipled in these matters?  We're well aware that that's not a great set of doors to have to choose between. But we don't see a third option. 

It is not our intention in sharing this video with viewers to point only at Governor Huckabee. Every one of the candidates has a problematic record in this regard. In fact, even the two candidates that get the highest scores on the Pulse report card, Senators Paul and Cruz, both voted for the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014, which was actually the reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998. In fact, our entire political system has, for decades now, been in love with managed economic policies and initiatives. Federal and state leadership alike have jumped wholly on that bandwagon, which began to accelerate in earnest under the 1990s. So, our goal in posting this video is to encourage all candidates to start thinking about the wrong turn we've taken in this regard and for voters to start confronting those candidates with the negative impact this has had on true education, on our children, and on our society more broadly.

NOTE: The video of the event comes from Livestream and the Tea Party Patriots, who partnered with Cedar Valley Patriots for Christ, Breitbart, and other organizations to mount the candidate summit at which it was captured. The commentary is Resounding Books' work. However, in this instance, because Kirsten was representing a larger group of experts and activists at this summit, we purposely did not attach our branding to this video. We will continue to work with our expert and activist colleagues nationwide to ensure that voters understand the problems with what Governor Huckabee is saying--and not saying--in this video as well as what his record has been more generally on wrongly tying of education to the economy.