Peter Cunningham is no educator. He's is a PR guy, and a pretty good one, who flacked for Arne Duncan back in Chicago and then followed him to D.C. where Duncan somehow made him an assistant secretary of education.

On Monday, the blog of the right-wing Fordham Institute carried Cunningham's polemic ("Muddying up the waters") aimed at Common Core critics Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. Hacker is an emeritus professor of political science at Queens College, City University of New York. Dreifus is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

A clearly over-matched Cunningham, was responding to their New York Times piece, "Who's Minding the Schools?". Why he chose Flypaper for his polemic is anyone's guess. But in the process, he winds up defending conservative supporters of CC against, those goofy, nasty Tea Party critics like Glen Beck who Cunningham explains, "is paid to stir the pot, to counter conservative education scholars (who are paid to actually think it through and get it right)."

What is it about conservatism that seems so attractive to White House liberals? Remember,  Arne Duncan's term at the DOE began with a partnership on charter schools with Newt Gingrich.

The Hacker/Dreifus piece is actually pretty good. It illustrates the problems connected with top down reform and high stakes testing. Although they never mention the role of testing giants Pearson or McGraw Hill, they  do emphasize the connection between Common Core and the testing madness inevitably packaged with the latest version of national standards. They show how CC can negatively affect teachers, ultimately leading to "backlash" from many teachers and parents, including the current Opt-Out movement. They include this ominous warning about what they say, "may be the most far-reaching experiment in American educational history."

 Whether the Common Core is called a curriculum or not, there’s little doubt that teachers will feel pressured to gear much of their instruction to this annual regimen. In the coming years, test results are likely to affect decisions about grade promotion for students, teachers’ job status and school viability. 

In response, Cunningham plays the scold. Don't the two professors know the difference between standards, curriculum, and assessment? Standards, Cunningham carefully explains, "are agreed-upon expectations for what children should know in certain subjects by certain ages, with curricula, which are the materials and the approaches that teachers use to help kids learn." And then there's the separate category of assessments, "which are tests to determine what students know, with accountability, which are systems of tracking student performance, determining which schools and teachers are succeeding or struggling, and providing support or intervening where necessary."

For anyone still confused, Cunningham offers up a track-and-field metaphor.

The standard is the bar that students must jump over to be competitive. The curriculum is the training program coaches use to help students get over the bar. The assessment is the track meet where we find out how high everyone can jump. And the accountability system is what follows after its all over and we want to figure out what went right, what went wrong, and what it will take to help kids jump higher.

Peter Cunningham would do well to take a couple of education courses or maybe even try teaching in a classroom for a while, if for not other reason that to deepen his own understanding of curriculum, before engaging in such empty theorizing. He might learn that education is much more that a track meet and curriculum so much more than a "training program" or simple skill-building regimen. Curriculum concerns the much broader question of what knowledge and experiences are most worthwhile for students, including how they should be taught and assessed.

Of course there's bound to be ongoing debate among educators and within society as a whole over these questions. For example Hacker and Dreifus worry that Common Core is being pushed from the top down, "introduced with hardly any public discussion. Americans know more about the events in Benghazi than they do about the Common Core." It's purpose is supposedly to make the U.S. more competitive in the global market place. But like all good educators, Hacker and Dreifus worry about the unintended consequences of this grand experiment. So do I. Public education has to be about democracy -- building an educated social base for democracy to exist and flourish as well as preparing young people to participate.

I'm not so sure Hacker/Dreifus are right about this being "the most far-reaching experiment in American educational history." To me, this is more a continuation of an ongoing debate over national standards and the role of the feds, the states, and the deeply invested textbook and testing companies that have always shaped the curriculum discussion. Teachers have always had to deal with pendulum shifts on standards and curriculum, and the swing with each regime change.

For Cunningham, the debate is mainly about definitions and therefore easily solved , as long as you accept his and Arne Ducan's vision of education being a race to the top, a high-stakes track meet with winners and losers. It's a vision I and hopefully lots of other teachers, parents and students will refuse to accept.