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.

Veteran teacher Eileen Riley Hall has some advice for David Coleman, architect of the Common Core standards.

Coleman famously said, in taped remarks at the New York State Education Department, that

“As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a (expletive) about what you feel or what you think.”

That remark, she says, typifies “all that is wrong with the soulless Common Core standards and its rigid, test-obsessed approach to education.”

They focus “myopically on intellectual skills theoretical children should have when they graduate from high school and then builds backward. However, a good teacher, like a good parent, begins by considering the needs of the real children in her classroom and builds forward. Children are not just walking brains, but bodies, hearts and souls as well. Contrary to Mr. Coleman’s crass assertion, our children’s thoughts and feelings should be the heart of our schools.”

She offers him a few lessons, based on her many years in the classroom:

“You don’t make kids smarter just by making school harder. If you’ve seen the convoluted Common Core elementary math lessons, you know this. Dictating one method of teaching doesn’t make sense, especially when that method complicates simple lessons, frustrating the majority of students. Schools should offer students a variety of ways to approach subjects, increasing opportunities for success.

However, the suffocating standardized tests demand one rigid methodology that does not allow teachers to tailor lessons to their students. Too often, students feel like failures when they are simply not developmentally ready for material or need a different strategy. Success is motivating; repeated failure is not. Build on children’s strengths; don’t hammer them with their weaknesses.”

A happy school is a productive school. “Children are in school for seven hours a day, five days a week, for 13 years. School, especially in the elementary years, should cultivate a child’s love of learning. Yet, the Common Core scorns all the creative endeavors (music, literature, art) that inspire students to imagine and dream. Instead of poetry, we now have technical reading. Imagination may not be quantifiable, but it keeps kids invested and ultimately yields far more impressive results than relentless test prep.”

What if all the millions now spent on new Common Core-aligned materials and consultants, new software and hardware for the testing, were spent instead to meet the needs of children? “Free lunch and breakfast programs; social workers and counselors; after-school, mentoring and tutoring programs; and smaller classes.”

If there had been any experienced classroom teachers on the committee that wrote the Common Core, these lessons might have been learned before they were written in stone and imposed on 46 states by the lure of Race to the Top gold. If the writing committee included as many teachers as testing experts, the Common Core would look very different and would not be facing massive pushback across the nation.

This is an interesting documentary on the Common Core, featuring some of its strongest supporters at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (as well as guest cameos by Jeb Bush and Bill Gates) and some of its strongest critics, notably Sandra Stotsky and James Milgram, both of whom served on the “validation committee,” but refused to sign off on the standards. It was produced by the Home School Legal Defense Association (represented by Mike Farris). So far as I know, home schoolers are not bound to abide by the Common Core standards, although they may need them if they take the SAT or the ACT.

The documentary makes two very provocative points about Common Core.

One is a civic critique of the undemocratic way in which the Common Core standards were written: by a small committee that included no classroom teachers, no specialists in early childhood education or in the teaching of children with disabilities or of children who are English language learners, and no working teachers of the subjects at issue. Customarily it takes two, there, or four years to wire state standards, because of the need to hear from different constituencies, especially those that are knowledgeable and directly affected. The Common Core standards were written in a year and adopted by 45 or 46 states in a year, because of the lure of $4.35 billion in federal dollars. The process was speedy and efficient, but it was not democratic. The absence of a democratic process has fed distrust, which in turn has created an angry backlash. The documentary has a few poignant moments about how democracy works. The writers of the Common Core would have benefited immensely by a reminder of what democracy means and how it should work.

The second interesting point that the film raises is whether a single set of national standards can meet the needs of both college-ready and career-ready. Some people complain that the standards are too hard, others complain that they are too easy. This is a contradiction at the heart of the CCSS.

There has been a conscious effort to say that “the train has left the station,” but that’s not a good enough reason to jump aboard (how do you jump aboard a train that has already left the station anyhow?).

First, you want to be sure that the train is going where you want to go. Second, be careful about who is driving the train.

I, for one, am not convinced that the train has left the station. I see more indications every day that the promoters of Common Core are getting desperate because of the negative public reaction. There is a palpable sense that the public can’t figure out how we got national standards in the absence of any democratic discussion about their pluses and minuses. And so we have Gates and newspaper editorials and television advertising and other promotional activities to sell us on something that not many people understand.

Nope, the train is still in the station, and a lot of parents and teachers need to be convinced and a lot of revisions need to be made before this train goes anywhere. This will be hard because it seems that the engineer, the conductor, and the crew have moved on to other jobs.