did not have the authority to make the states adopt them. By 2007, Ravitch no longer accepted the free-market components of education reform. She continued to work with Hirsch calling for more attention to curriculum and instruction. In 2008 she became a co-chair of the board of the newly created Common Core, Inc. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the research-based Curriculum Maps project presented a "comprehensive, coherent sequence of thematic curriculum units connecting the skills outlined in the CCSS with suggested student objectives, texts, activities, and much more". In her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education, published in 2010, Ravitch proclaimed: Every school should have a well-conceived, coherent curriculum. A curriculum is not a script, but a set of general guidelines. Students should regularly engage in the study and practice of the liberal arts and sciences: history, literature, geography, the sciences, civics, mathematics, the arts, and foreign languages, as well as health and physical education. She continued: Nations such as Japan and Finland have developed excellent curricula that spell out what students are supposed to learn in a wide variety of subjects. If we are willing to learn from top-performing nations, we should establish a substantive national curriculum that declares our intention to educate all children in the full range of liberal arts and sciences, as well as physical education. The curriculum would designate the essential knowledge and skills that students need to learn. In September 2010, Ravitch left Common Core, Inc., becoming disillusioned by the Gates’-funded Common Core. The 3rd edition of the book, published in 2016, changed the tone accordingly: In the original edition of this book, I expressed my view that the nation needs national standards. I thought that the culture wars of the 1990s are behind us. I believed that common sense would prevail and that professionals in every field could agree on the knowledge and skills that all citizens needed. I did not make any recommendations about national tests. The fundamental error of the Common Core standards is that they were written by a small group of people without the involvement of classroom teachers and scholars in the respective fields. They were written with remarkable speed but without any public review process. There were no means by which to revise them after they were published. States could add up to 15