Jeff Bryant is a marketing and communications expert, and he understands why Common Core is in deep trouble.
The “education reform movement” is not really a movement. It has no mass base. It is a public relations campaign created by a very small number of people with deep pockets. They thought they could pull a fast one.
But the American public is not buying.
The fake “reformers” made claims that aren’t true, and their campaign is floundering.
Please read his article to find the many links he uses to sustain his argument.
He writes:
For years, elites in big business, foundations, well-endowed think tanks, and corporate media have conducted a well-financed marketing campaign to impress on the nation’s public schools an agenda of change that includes charter schools, standardized testing, and “new and improved” standards known as the Common Core.
These ideas were sold to us as sure-fire remedies for enormous inequities in a public school system whose performance only appears to be relatively low compared to other countries if you ignore the large percentage of poor kids we have.
But the “education reform” ad campaign never got two important lessons everyone starting out in the advertising business learns: Never make objective claims about your product that can be easily and demonstrably disproven, and never insult your target audience.
For instance, you can make the claim, “this tastes great” because that can’t be proven one way or the other. But when you claim, “your kids will love how this tastes,” and parents say, “my kids think it tastes like crap,” you’re pretty much toast. And you make matters all the worse if you respond, “Well, if you were a good parent you’d tell your kid to eat it anyway.”
Those two lessons seem to be completely lost on advocates behind the menu of education policies currently being force-fed to classroom teachers, parents, and school children across the country. As more Americans take a big bite of the education reform sandwich, more choose to spit it out.
The Common Core was presented and sold as some sort of historic miracle cure, but the evidence is lacking, says Bryant.
What is happening now, he says, is the collapse of a very badly thought out marketing scheme:
It’s now obvious that advertising claims behind current education policies like the Common Core were never based on strong objective evidence. More Americans are noticing this and objecting. And politicians are likely to get more circumspect about which side of the debate they lean to.
So what’s an education reformer to do?
So far, the strategy is to churn out more editorial, along the lines of what David Brooks wrote, to exhort Americans to “stay the course” on what is becoming a more obviously failing endeavor.
But as this sloganeering wears thin, we’re likely to get a new and improved “message” from the policy elite – a Common Core 2.0, let’s say, or a “next generation” of “reform.”
What’s really needed, of course, is to see the marketing campaign for what it really is: a distraction from educational problems that are much more pressing. Why, for example, focus on unsubstantiated ideas like the Common Core rather than do something that would really matter, such as improve instructional quality, reverse school funding cuts that are harming schools, or address the inequities and socioeconomic conditions that researchers have demonstrated are persistent causes of low academic performance?
But that would require something much more than another marketing campaign. It would mean developing a whole new product.
So maybe in a few years, people will think about the Common Core standards and put them in the same category as the Edsel and the New Coke, products that were heavily sold by their creators but had a poor marketing campaign and failed.
I am working on a doctoral research project inspired by Diane’s book, Death and Life of the Great American School System (2011). If the public school system–as many of us knew it, at least–is dead or near death, it would stand to reason that public school teachers who remember the system as it was prior to No Child Left Behind (2002) have experienced loss and grief. If you remember what it was like to teach prior to No Child Left Behind, if you feel as if teaching completely changed when No Child Left Behind was implemented, or if you ever felt saddened by some of the changes that resulted from educational reform, then you may be interested in taking my survey.
https://ndstate.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5nCLnPAFadWZX93
Salon Magazine has consistently published many thoughtful pieces, exposing the charade of the men-behind-the-curtain of the Ed Reform movement.
It is slowly, slowly, sloooowwwwwwwllllyy finding its way into other media outlets because of the very things that Bryant lays out in his perceptive article. The secretive, Top-Down and brutal cudgel that the Ed Reform folks have wielded has almost entirely been because of the Big Money behind their attack plans. Their carpet bombing tactics got them pretty far in many state legislatures and municipal offices.
But their “authority” has always ONLY been the Money that bought the Big Names who backed their proposals.
And soon, when people actually see for themselves what is happening to THEIR kids and THEIR community because of their Grand Design, they naturally become repulsed.
Bravo Salon. There will be a many more articles coming from them…and other outlets because Money can only operate the advertising illusion for so long before someone actually has to try the product for themselves.
an entirely failed policy
We had a ten-year referendum on standards-and-testing-based “reform.” It was called NCLB, and it was a train wreck. But instead of learning their lesson about this, the deformers doubled down with Son of NCLB, NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized. And they did so for one reason and one reason only: That’s what the plutocrats wanted–a single national educational Powerpoint bullet list to tag their crappy assessments and their crappy computer-adaptive software to.
But no one is buying except the profoundly ignorant and those who are benefiting financially from the plutocrats’ spending to get their deranged business plan off the ground.
Top-down, invariant, totalitarian extrinsic-punishment-and-reward-based solutions to the nonexistent problem of failed schools are the last thing we need. We are a free people, and we shall resist this attempted takeover of our schools. We reject the backroom Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. We reject the breathtakingly invalid assessments and teacher and school evaluation schemes. We reject top-down control of our schools. We reject replacing our great public school system with a system of private schools run by grifters. We reject the mind-blowingly amateurish Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] and their narrowing and distortion of our pedagogy and curricula and assessments. We EMPHATICALLY reject the abuse to which you are subjecting little children. We reject the dishonor and disrespect you are showing to your honored, respected teachers and we are sick to death your uninformed, bull-in-a-china-shop rampage through the nation’s classrooms.
Mark this: we are determined to be quite gritful in our resistance to your rapaciousness and to your ignorant meddling.
Go tell it to your wind-up toys at Camp Philos, plutocrats. NO ONE ELSE is buying it.
No one.
correction: We reject the dishonor and disrespect you are showing to OUR honored, respected teachers
YEAH BOB!!!! Maybe the union should take out a full page ad in the New York Times with your message. I wonder if they would tolerate it!! You have a superb voice!!!!! Diane must be proud!!! ☺
Thanks Diane!
Well said, Jeff! This is an outstanding piece. Bravo!!!
Really beautifully written and documented. Thank you!
Is this CC piece “sponsored content”, where they pay to have it online at a given outlet?
http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/28/how-common-core-state-standards-support-national-readiness/
I think that’s what “featured partner” means.
I like it – Common Core=New Coke. Yes! Market it all you want, get the Chamber of Commerce to push it. If people don’t like it, public not on board, it will fail.
Funny though if I remember correctly, Coke did not make fun of the customers for being too white, too suburban, and too hysterical.
Any “sea-change” that can only be implemented through the use of lies, threats, corecion, fear, punishment, insult, and humiliation is destined for FAILURE. It was always a matter of time. The money and power behind this movement helped buy some extra time that the idea did not deserve. That time is now running out.
CCSS will join the ash heap of failed education reform movemnets sooner rather than later at this point. It was all just one very big bluff. And now they are being called on it.
According to today’s NYTimes the Obama Administration is doing the same thing with Health Care it is doing with education, according to the article,”Health Law’s Pay Policy Is Skewed, Panel Finds.” The article shows that doctors with large numbers of poor patients may provide equally high quality care to doctors with affluent patients with different results. The article even compares the issue to performance pay for teachers. It is worth reading.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/louis-blasts-common-core-standardized-testing-nyc-schools-article-1.1772304
Louis C.K. blasts Common Core, standardized testing in NYC schools
The 46-year-old comedian and father of two girls ripped the tests on Twitter on Monday. He wrote that schooling has changed and that testing is ‘this massive stressball that hangs over the whole school.’