Apparently, the man behind the ACORN sting videos is now set on taking down a new foe: the Common Core Standards.

Today, O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released a video showing conversations with Dianne Barrow, an accounts manager for textbook publishing company Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt. Here it is:

Significant quotes from the video include the following:

“I hate kids. I’m in it to sell books, don’t even kid yourself for a heartbeat.”
 

Of Pearson Education, a competitor in the business for whom Barrow once worked: “[Pearson] owns the world. You know? They just do underhanded things.”
 

“You don’t think that the educational publishing companies are in it for education do you? No, they’re in it for the money.”

I don’t wish to detract too much from O’Keefe’s video, but it’s not really the smoking gun it appears to be. Anyone involved with education knows very well that the development and implementation of the Common Core Standards meant big money for the $19 billion K-12 textbook industry. All Barrow really does in the video is confirm that the job of this industry is to make profits.

Unlike the ACORN issue, opposition to the Common Core Standards tends to be less politically polarizing: liberals hate it because it has taken away autonomy from teachers and is tied to standardized tests; conservatives hate it because it smacks of federal overreach into education and the standards are supposedly not rigorous enough.  

If you’re interested in a better (though not perfect) video on the history of Common Core and its problems, take a look at this one: