Peter Greene, high school teacher and blogger in Pennsylvania, is a master analyst of rhetoric. He particularly excels at spotting vapid commentary by non-educators who want to tell him how to conduct his classroom. Fortunately or unfortunately, this might well be a full-time job since there is an education industry of non-educators fully prepared to tell him how to teach.

In this post, he selects a pair of economists at the Brookings Institution for what he calls the “most clueless” commentary on the Common Core.

He writes:

“Their starting point is simple. The CCSS “are under attack from the right and the left. Liberals fear that policy makers will use the standards to punish teachers. Conservatives believe the Common Core is an attempt by the federal government to take over schools.” Oversimplified version of the opposition, but okay. Their goal is to mount “a fresh defense of the Common Core.”

“They explain how educational standards are supposed to work in paragraphs that seem designed to explain human schools to Martians (or, perhaps, economists). They summarize many of the objections to the CCSS, and get most of the major ones into a few sentences, including referencing the research that shows no connection between standards and student achievement.

“And then this “fresh defense” goes off the rails.

“Common Core will succeed where past standards based reform efforts have failed,” they boldly declare. Why, you ask? Sadly for this “fresh defense,” you already know all the answers.

“The CCSS were designed with teacher, researcher, and pedagogy expert feedback. This is duly cited with a reference to the CCSS website, so you know it must be true. A recent analysis of standards show that the Core are better than many states (citing the Fordham Institute research bought and paid for by CCSS backers).

“The CCSS assessments are better. You can even take them on computers! The authors argue that this is better because computer testing is cheaper (!), it eliminates written answers (hard to score!) and can include accommodations for special needs students (someday, probably). And those tests can be adaptive so that they match the skill level of the student. Not a word about test validity, but hey– at least they’re cheap, right?”

And he adds: “Eventually we arrive at a point. “Standards…are meant to simplify complicated problems.” And here’s our next standard talking point. “We ask too much of teachers. It is unreasonable to give them a classroom full of students and take full responsibility for teaching them on their own.” And I’ll take a moment here to get a glass of water so I can do a spit take. Yes, teachers– we need CCSS because our jobs are too hard for us. Why, gosh, thanks, boys.”

And sadly concludes:

“I actually scrolled back to make sure I wasn’t accidentally reading something from five years ago. But no– yesterday’s date. So with that, I award Brookings the gold medal for Most Clueless CCSS Commentary of 2014. Boys, sadly. your “fresh defense” is a collection of time-worn, over-used, discredited CCSS talking points. I mean, it does have the virtue of cramming as many of them into one space as I have ever seen. But fresh? I’ve seen fresher things on the Sci-Fi channel on a Saturday afternoon.”