We’ve seen this before, warns Robert Morrison of the Family Research Council.

The Common Core State Standards, which Morrison calls “Obamacore,” represent just another misguided and dangerous attempt to centralize America’s schools.

Centralization has long been a goal of education reformers.  Morrison correctly points out that the Ku Klux Klan successfully banned all private education in Oregon during the 1920s.  Though the Oregon law was blocked by the US Supreme Court, the goal was clear.  The Klan wanted to centralize school, to force all children to go through a government-directed educational program.

Back then, Morrison writes, the US Supreme Court had a better sense of the dangers of educational centralization.  These days, the bureaucratizers and centralizers have a freer hand.  It is up to religious conservatives such as those at the Family Research Council to resist.

“Under ObamaCore,” Morrison warns,

the elites in Washington shall direct the destinies of our children.

This is unwarranted. It will ultimately fail, just as the fifty-year record of federal usurpation of state and local authority in education has failed.

It necessarily involves indoctrination of all our children in federally-mandated curricula. We know what this means.

Strong stuff.  As we’ve noted before, conservatives as a whole are not united in their opposition to the Common Core State Standards.  Perhaps potent rhetoric like this will tip the scales.