Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli have a short essay this morning, Repairing the Conservative School Reform Coalition, that addresses their sense of fragmentation on the right in education policy. In the last few weeks, debates over both the Common Core and reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act have shown additional shredding of what was once a fairly broad political coalition in 2001, a coalition between key liberal Democrats and George W. Bush that led to the No Child Left Behind Act. I winced several times at the historical inaccuracies in the Finn/Petrilli piece (let’s just say their description of the 1970s is about 30 years out of date), but their impression of the conservative politics is correct.

Brief rewind (and not to the 1970s): Conservatives skeptical of the federal government either went along with the early Bush initiatives on education or found themselves genuinely enthusiastic about NCLB for a few years. The existence of a so-called Washington Consensus was not imaginary; as I argued in Accountability Frankenstein, the distrust of both educators and states was sufficiently high among federal policymakers that a Rube Goldberg-like set of mandates looked like a reasonable policy. At the time, the mandates appealed both to liberals George Miller and Ted Kennedy and also the right-of-center policy folks such as Finn and Petrilli.1

That Washington Consensus was short-lived, and not just because a number of organizations and individuals decided that the quixotic mandates of NCLB were a poor use of federal authority. Within a few years, some governors found that the adequate-yearly-progress (or AYP) definition of proficiency-percentage targets led to perverse incentives, so that those who pushed effectively higher proficiency thresholds in their own states saw their schools labeled as failures far more frequently than for other states. By 2006, those critics included Jeb Bush, whose state’s elementary schools were commonly labeled A or B by the state’s accountability framework but failed to make AYP by the federal standards. By the time Margaret Spelling called NCLB “99.9% pure” late in the Bush presidency, that was not a view shared by Petrilli, a presidential appointee in the Department of Education in Bush’s first term. Petrilli has pushed Fordham’s “reform realism” framework for a number of years, and defectors from the Washington Consensus include a broad swath of Republicans.

Even today, Republican leaders in the House and the Senate have widely-ranging views of the proper role of federal education law. For the ranking Republican in the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee, Lamar Alexander, the federal government should avoid mandating anything as detailed as teacher evaluation policy. At the same time, House Education and the Workforce Committee chair John Kline introduced a bill last week that would have tighter teacher evaluation mandates than the bill put forward by Democratic Senator Tom Harkin.

So when right-wing attacks on the Common Core developed outside of the Beltway in the past year, the evolving chaos on the right came on top of existing policy differences among Very Serious Conservatives. If the politics of symbolism weren’t so disturbing at their base, I could enjoy some time watching the resources Jeb Bush’s foundations are expending to defend the Common Core. But Glenn Beck’s blatherings are too popular to indulge in Schadenfreude. I also could point out how the Finn/Petrilli piece skates over the incompatibility of simultaneously defending voucher policies and academic curriculum standards (including rigorous science education standards), but the deeper issue is the fundamental irrelevance of that inconsistency to the Common-Core conspiracy theories.

I have watched the evolution of the conspiracy theories vicariously, such as through grad student Ken Libby’s Twitter account (search for the hashtag #corespiracy). A Phyllis Schlafly column from mid-May will give you the flavor of some of it. As with most conspiracy theories, there is a germ of truth hidden somewhere in the material. That germ of truth is that the Common Core is intended to be a national set of normative curriculum standards. Please note the word choice: national, not federal. The federal government did create substantial incentives to adopt the Common Core through the Race to the Top grant competition, and defenders of the Common Core are both technically correct and politically incorrect to claim that state adoption of the Common Core has been voluntary. But the Common Core conspiracy writings go far beyond any serious debate about the role of the federal government.

It is the rolling right-wing goat rodeo that must be scaring Jeb Bush, Checker Finn, and Mike Petrilli. Tea Party activists remain a threat to any incumbent Republican, as the defeat of Tony Bennett in Indiana last fall and results from Tuesday’s primary in Virginia show. Those who identify themselves as Establishment conservatives must feel like beating their head against the wall. How did this happen to us?2 Thus, the defense of the Common Core, with Finn and Petrilli’s essay that invites conservatives to identify themselves as serious by backing the Common Core, and they try this without ever naming Beck or Schlafly as conspiracy theorists. It’s an interesting strategy. I’m not sure it’s going to corral the goats.