Marketing is everything. A wise English professor once told me, you might write the worst book in the world, but if you have a good marketer, connections, not to mention financial backing, it will be published and it will probably sell.
Common Core has been sold to the American people, backed by a lot of powerful people—governors, Republicans and Democrats, Pearson and other publishers, think tanks and Bill Gates and corporate leaders. A lot of money has been put into it and they want to see it pay off in the long run. In fact, the use of money to give public schools to market this program is worrisome.
But while selling a message might initially be easy, keeping it afloat is more difficult. I think that is what we are now seeing with Common Core. Here are four mistakes I see in their marketing:
1. The Use of the Word “Will”
Whenever I hear Common Core being peddled in the media by Ed. Secretary Arne Duncan, media shills or superintendents they say Common Core:
- WILL get students college and career ready.
- WILL be better than the old standards.
- WILL be more rigorous.
- WILL teach reading and math better.
- WILL raise achievement.
- WILL close learning gaps.
- WILL bring students with disabilities up to the level of everyone else.
This air of certainty is too much. No standards are this perfect. Most are filled with flaws.
Plus, there has been no serious research surrounding the Common Core. Even Bill Gates himself said “It would be great if our education stuff worked, but we won’t know for probably a decade.”
And the old “Every child WILL read by 2014” is still fresh on a lot of people’s minds. Most people are tired of will statements and know they are being deceived.
The truth is that we don’t know if it will do any of the things they say it will at all. If they had said, “We hope this will work…or, it appears to us that it will work….” Anything but the definitive will word would have been more acceptable.
2. Lacking Legitimate Research
Along with this are the cheery faux research papers that have been circulated about how Common Core are the best standards ever. These papers are everywhere, even in college libraries (I guess they get CC funding too). If you scan data bases, you will find papers looking like real research claiming that Common Core is grrrreat!
This lack of real research, in the case of Common Core, could also hurt them. When research is missing, parents and teachers rely on what they see in the classroom…like all the problems with serious mistakes having to do with math.
Wordiness
The other serious mistake with Common Core marketing is that the program itself is wordy. I have a post on Weird Reform Education Words. Some words are fine but you can overdo it.
For years public schooling has been the butt of jokes for many confusing acronyms and definitions. Parents and teachers want to understand but they love simplicity.
Common Core creators seem to add words to look smarter than we mere mortals. But we mortals need to buy into their program.
Here are words you may or may not understand, but which I think are confusing:
- scaffolding
- i3
- rating rubics
- text dependent questions
- domain specific
- low frequency
- high utility
- temporal design
- universal design
- anchor standards
- procedural fluency
- tiered vocabulary
Common Core is Not Really Anything New
I am always surprised how what Common Core peddles as new isn’t new at all. For example, I just read how teachers will now use Common Core Semantic Mapping with their students. And this morning on CBS I watched a teacher teaching statistics to a very homogenous class of children (not the diverse kind we hear about).
Is this new? Raise your hand English teachers. How many of you never knew about mapping words as a writing exercise? How many math teachers haven’t taught some statistics to their classes?
They may have re-wrapped the present, but it looks to me like Common Core is heavily into re-gifting.
All of these marketing errors will ultimately come to light if they haven’t already.
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