As it turn out, the world can’t neatly be divided into 2 teams as much as their op-ed tried to.

Not only are they wrong about the level of criticism, and completely distort libertarians, but the main reason there has been “little outcry” is that few voters know this is happening. It was buried in the stimulus legislation, and has since been overshadowed by health care, Wall Street “reform”, unemployment benefits extensions, Cap & Trade, and other policy matters.

I would hypothesize that if we took a poll today on “Do you support [your state's] board of education adopting the Common Core Curriculum?” the results would be:
Yes: 7%
No: 6%
Huh?: 87%

Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), interestingly the same volume that contains Hayek’s essay “Why I’m Not a Conservative,” that education in particular requires multiple perspectives and standards: “There is not – and cannot be in a free society – a single standard by which we can decide on the relative importance of different aims or the relative desirability of different methods. Perhaps in no other field is the continued availability of alternative ways so important as in that of education, where the task is to prepare young people for an ever changing world” (p. 385).

For those who want to keep fighting to salvage the terminology, consider this additional excerpt from Checker and Petrilli’s column:

‎”Three years ago, an Education Next poll asked whether people favored “a single ‎national standard and a single national test for all students in the United States? Or do ‎you think that there should be different standards and tests in different states?” ‎

It wasn’t even close. A whopping 73 percent of respondents wanted a single test, and ‎Republicans were likelier to support this idea than Democrats. Those self-identifying ‎as “extremely conservative” were by far the most enthusiastic about national testing: 88 ‎percent of them favored the single test approach, versus 64 percent of liberals.”‎

That’s worth re-stating: 88% of those who self-identified as “extremely conservative” favored the centralized option. Taking back the term “conservative” against numbers like that seems like a sisyphean task of enormous proportion.

Mathew you are exactly right. When Kevin Jennings injects his political agenda in the standards, maybe they’ll wake up.
When P21 inject their “soft skills” in the standards, maybe they’ll wake up.
When our students are graduating as political activists and community organizers who don’t know how to add/subtract, spell or write, maybe they’ll wake up.

As I’ve said before when they’ve made this kind of ridiculous assertion, what conservatives favor is not a single model of life imposed on everyone, but a single set of rules everyone is equally obligated to follow. The reason we want this is precisely because we value the individual liberty that allows everyone to do things their own way. Governing society by a neutral set of rules where everyone is under the same obligations is the only way to allow everyone to follow different and individually chosen life arrangements. National standards represent a step toward standardizing everyone’s life arrangements, and therefore a step away from the conservative model of governance grounded in netural rules of obligation.