Peter Greene, a teacher in Pennsylvania, sees the incredible marketing opportunities associated with Common Core. And he worries that the marketing department has missed some even more spectacular opportunities to sell CC-aligned products:
True– “CCSS” has been stamped every printed object that a school might potentially buy. Every book and worksheet now touts its CCSS-ness. Heck, there are elementary level bulletin board decorations out there that are CCSS ready.
But I think the Architects of the Reformatorium have missed some opportunities. Why not the Official Soft Drink of CCSS? Why not a CCSS clothing line– polo shirts will probably sell well, but I see a natural market for CCSS straightjackets as well. When can I expect to see a Happy Meal with CCSS action figures inside? I can think of many fun things to do with a little plastic David Coleman action figure. Many, many fun things.
Think of the licensing opportunities. Plush Arne Duncan dolls. CCSS board games– as your piece moves around the board you must stop every other square to take a test, then at the end, each piece is repeatedly weighed to see which has added the most value while going around the board. A CCSS blimp [insert your own hot air joke here]. So many missed opportunities.
But wait! What if there is an update? What if Arne announces CCSS 2.0?
Well, then, “school districts across the country (well, public ones, anyway) will need to upgrade their software, books, materials, programs-in-a-box, training programs, etc etc etc ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching.
“When it comes to marketing and money streams, tie-ins, licensing, and spin-offs are great. But nothing beats planned obsolescence.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s a shame Steve Jobs is no longer with us, since he was the Master of planned obsolescence.
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I’m a PC person. In my world, Bill Gates has been the Master of planned obsolescence and he is not going away anytime soon.
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it’s an interesting comment on how the culture has changed: not so long ago, Detroit carmakers were excoriated for designing cars intended to fall apart in a few years.
Now, those who do so are given the Keys to the Kingdom, and their will-to-power is marketed as altruism.
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well, he at least had good taste, and, when he left Apple, did some very interesting stuff with BSD.
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That is a riot. KC
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We need a riot.
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“I can think of many fun things to do with a little plastic David Coleman action figure. Many, many fun things.”
Like we used to do with plastic army men when I was in grade school, I’d probably simultaneously light firecrackers, one in its mouth and the other between its leg, unless I got the bright idea to drill a hole up its arse and stick one in there. Then if that didn’t do enough damage I would have just lit the head on fire and watch dripping flaming plastic splatter onto the ground.
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I think you overlooked brackets (“I bought it at Jared’s”), hula hoops, and bumper stickers saying “I Love CCSS 1.0, 2.0, etc.”, Halftime NFL contests where Howie, Terry, and gang try to guess the winning State. The list goes on and on. And let’s not forget those CCSS erasers!
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Erase to the Top!!!
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You may think this is parody, but no parody could possibly outrace (to the top) what the Milo Minderbinders of the world already have ready to roll out.
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CCSS: the pedagogical equivalent of Egyptian cotton.
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A literary reference! Arrest that man!
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LOL
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Let the children of the proles eat Egyptian cotton!
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Mr. Greene phrased in a far more hilarious sense than I would have but he’s right. The standards will change. Probably about the time the scores get better. This will occur when governors and mayors start gaming the tests to get better scores and claim improvement.
Then college professors and employers will complain that CCSS is not actually creating college and career ready K-12 students. Then it will be time to reshape standards and tests again so edupreneurs can release all new support materials.
Seriously. Who doesn’t see this coming?
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The elusive brass ring. Just when you think you can finally grab it, it is moved to a new location.
This is a purposeful lose-lose situation for 2/3rds of our students.
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Really not that hilarious, is it? Because we do see it coming. The use of logo polo shirts, infused waters that promote better test scores, prepared meals with just the precise balance of nutrients for test achievement, logo chewing gums designed to help reduce test anxiety, logo wrist bracelets and hula hoops that are very deliberate and lucrative attempts at worming one’s way into a cultural/psychological acceptance of the unacceptable. Walk Away Now While We Can…or is it too late already?
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I’ve been in schools were t-shirts, trinkets and all that crap was used to try to improve test scores. Got written up for not wearing the t-shirt on the assigned days, and I gave it back, which according to the bitch, oops I mean principal at the time, I threw across the room at her (I actually just set it on the table in front of me and told them to give it to a deserving student).
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Love it. Common core action figures, or maybe inaction figures. Gridlock man and obfuscation boy.
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inaction figures. LOL
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Label it all
Common Core College and Career Readiness Assessment Program
C.C.C.C.R.A.P.
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Amen! So true.
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“Plush Arne Duncan dolls”
Now that is just creepy.
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Think: Plush Commissioner King dolls, though. I shudder to think about it.
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I’ll get the pins.
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Great post, Peter!
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Excellent! I believe that this has been the plan from the get-go.
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LOL!!! You forgot the CCSS action figures will need villains… Teachers (of course,) they could have a Diane Ravitch villain (All she cares about are teachers and student learning,) a Linda Darling Hammond Villain (She was a creator, but went bad when her mind was polluted with ideas of equity, and authentic assessment). The Finlandians could be a kind of villain/hero who is best at everything but sometimes they try to explain why (and that just doesn’t fit the American model of learning).
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Scholastic could bring out a whole series of chapter books. Titles, anyone?
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Common Core to the rescue – saving children from the depths of hell found in the public schools systems. They are rescued and placed in the heavenly charter schools where the angelic choir sings the Hallelujah Chorus as their little brains are suddenly enlightened with reading and math facts. Beaming, their arms reach out as the College Professors from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton put colorful leis around their necks inviting them to follow Arne Duncan as he leads them towards the Ivy League doors of knowledge. They are each given a golden basketball and they dribble their way to lucrative careers in government where knowledge is superfluous and power is supreme.
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TAGO!
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Duane – you made my day.
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I would imagine Pearson could offer its own version of ‘Schoolhouse Rocks!’ in line with CCSS: ‘High Stakes Testing Rocks!’ Something with songs like ‘Getting Closer (Read Like a Detective)’ and ‘The Tale of Mr. Coleman’. Add more titles as you see fit. 😉
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When the Michelle Rhee de-coder ring is in my kids happy meal I’ll know its time to throw in the towel.
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Needed to de-code the meaning of PARCC test items.
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Cha ching!!
http://youtu.be/Wj_OmtqVLxY
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Grab your phone, folks, and for a mere 100 billion dollars avail yourselves of the magic elixir, the philosopher’s stone, the fabulous educational cure-all!
You’ve heard about those expensive fixes–highly educated teachers, healthy home environments, small classes, after-school enrichment programs, well-equipped schools, libraries, arts programs, science programs, special education, carefully thought-out learning progressions, robust curricula, great curricular materials, and all that rot. Fuggitabouit!
Why pay for all these when for half your school budget you can have DEFORMY MAGIC?
Just teach to the bullet list of standards and teach to the test. It’s THAT EASY!!!
And DEFORMY MAGIC not only does students. It does teachers and schools as well!!!
The secret to DEFORMY MAGIC is our patented new not-SMARTER, im-BALANCED and PARCC on Kids’ Throats tests, collectively known as the Common Core College and Career Readiness Assessment Program, or C.C.C.C.R.A.P.
And boy, do I have a deal for you on those!
120 students per class? No problem!
High crime and poverty rates? No problem!
Students with crack-addicted mothers? No problem!
Schools falling down? No problem?
Hungry children? NO PROBLEM!
DEFORMY MAGIC takes care of it all as quickly as you can say VAM, BAM, THANK YOU MA’AM!!!
DEFORMY MAGIC is a registered trademark of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, formerly known as Achieve, Inc.
Offer void in sane nation states.
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In all seriousness Robert, how do you think this reform movement will be judged by educational historians (the Diane Ravtichs’ of the future) 50 years from now? What’s your take on it, snake oil aside?
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As Diane Ravitch details in her brilliant Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, the history of education in the United States has been one of the imposition on educators of edufads by outside amateurs. If you were to take the wayback machine to the 1970s, you would find that education in the U.S. was absolutely dominated by Behaviorism. The idea was that it was unscientific to try to think about, talk about, respond to what was going on in students’ minds–that one should, instead, condition behaviors. Every teacher in the U.S. had to write behavioral objectives for every lesson. Every textbook had behavioral objectives for every lesson. Workshops and conferences were held to explain how the behavioral revolution was going to usher in the new Golden Age. The educrats, administrators, politicians, pundits, and oligarchs spoke with almost one voice on this subject.
When was the last time you saw a behavioral objective in the margins of a teacher edition?
These edufads come and go. They do a lot of damage. They fail. And then the next one comes along.
The very bright folks who work for educational publishing houses do their best to work within the prevailing education mythos. So do teachers. To the extent possible, they teach DESPITE whatever happens to be hot on the education midway this carnival season.
What’s hot right now is standards-and-testing. When NCLB was passed, were were told that standards-and-testing was going to result in 100% proficiency in math and reading by 2014. Well, it’s now 2014, and by the deformers’ own preferred measurements, there has been almost no improvement in either. Instead of learning that lesson, the deformers have doubled down. They’ve given us Son of NCLB. NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized.
A couple of notions will survive from all of this: a) the value of close reading and b) the value of reading connected texts within a knowledge domain. Eventually, the summative testing elephant squatting on our kids, teachers, administrators, and schools will collapse of its own dead weight. We will move on to a new era in reaction to that–formative assessment that disappears into the instruction. That’s my prediction.
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And for those hard-to-improve students, we have a special deal on our follow-up intervention,
REFORMY PRIVATE PRISONS
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BTW, my comments above should not be construed as an endorsement of either of the two new big basal reading products. I have not reviewed these in detail.
One thing I would like for everyone to know:
When you see the pictures of big-name consultants plastered all over your basal textbooks and in the marketing materials for these, you will be led to believe that these people played key roles in the programs’ development.
I have no idea what the consultants for those reading programs did, but I can tell you from personal experience that typically, these big-name consultants have almost no actual involvement. The publishers bring them in for a meeting. They talk generally about some aspect of the program. The consultant signs a contract for using his or her image. MAYBE the consultant reviews a lesson or two.
I have worked on many, many big basal programs with “authors” who never wrote a single word of the texts that their names are on.
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Again, I have no idea what is the case with the new reading programs and the consultants on those. These might be exceptions to the general rule. And though I have not reviewed either of the two new big basal CC$$-based reading programs, I am encouraged by the marketing materials for them that say that the units have been organized by knowledge domains (e.g., kids read a number of works about reptiles; they read a number of works about Egypt; etc).
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How about voo doo dolls of Arne Duncan & David Coleman? They could come with pins to stick into the dolls…
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Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
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MARKETING oh yes! Everything about education reform (corporate reform) today screams marketing. Kids today grow up with marketing in a whole different way and a whole different part of their world. I know what I am saying is cliche to many people who have been on top of this for a long time so I won’t go into one of my usual rants. What bothers me the most is the simple fact that while we are educating them to be wary about this constant barrage of marketing the education system is selling out and buying into the marketing being done to the public school system. Kids, at least my students, are extremely smart and see this huge inconsistency. So what are we really saying????????
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Neat!
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There is an interesting side angle to stories which bring to light the benefits from spending more on education, such as class size, new programs, etc.
The benefits are always touted to improve education, which can arguably be challenged as quite often they do not result in meaningful or measurable improvements.
But, such benefits are not limited to the children who are offered up to ensure funding is approved.
There is a “trickle down” benefit for teachers, administrators, contractors, suppliers, education bureaucracies, and varied industries in technology, publishing, consortium, and others.
With each new program to address a problem, we add another layer of “education” yet the results rarely achieve the long forgotten objective.
Its time for “Education Inc.” stop the endless search for new answers to questions answered decades ago.
“Old School” approaches worked fine for decades without adding layer upon layer of programs to address problems which public education should be responsible to address.
In has been the failure of “New School” public education to recognize the education ‘wheel’ worked perfectly fine and it need not be reinvented.
Case in point has been the fallout from Common Core, the untested national education standard/curriculum being shoved on the nation with a marketing campaign rather than concrete evidence it would be superior to state driven education policies.
Unless more parents get involved and drive public education policies, the industries and education bureaucracies will continue on the course which does little for the students but much for the ‘industry’.
Bye for now….
Tony
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