JonathonSpectre posted:

A few years ago I had a faculty meeting where our principal handed out some "research" that purported to show that children's socioeconomic status had almost no effect on their performance in school and in fact the clearest indicator of student success was the teacher's questioning technique.

Yes, that's right, my student who literally lived in the loving woods in a tent and cooked food on sticks over fire wasn't doing poorly due to the lack of shelter and any sort of stability whatsoever in his life, it was that I was giving non-specific praise in class!

Of course the entire faculty straight-up started laughing at how completely ridiculous this was. My principal began trying to argue that gee golly that's the research right here until your eagle-eyed correspondent did a quick Google search and found out the author of the research works for a company that, wouldn't you loving know it, just happens to sell the quick fix to all problems, a bunch of insanely expensive poo poo about questioning techniques! For the low low price of eight or nine thousand dollars a year, all those pesky problems we teachers have identified ("This kid has almost no shot, mom's a druggie with no control or actual care or concern, dad's not in the picture, they're living out of a loving motel, he's been level 1 math and reading his entire life, he only owns one pair of pants and one pair of shoes and the cops keep picking him up wandering the streets at 2 AM on weekdays") will just... sort of... fix themselves once the teacher knows how to correctly ask an effective question!

This is the same poo poo that has happened to Common Core. Now it's a marketing label used by the educational "stuff" industry to sell schools the same giant catfish they've been sold over and over again, but now it has a new sticker on it that says, "Common Core Compatible!"

The unbelievable speed with which Common Core became a political hot potato is scary. Even something as simple as, "3rd graders should know how to do single-digit multiplication by the end of the year" is now a reason to fight to the loving death against THE TYRANT OBAMA and his CZARS trying to INDOCTRINATE OUR CHILDREN. This same poo poo said completely unironically, mind you, by people who then say things like, "Hey Duane we gotta run, we gotta head to church, it's little Sally's youth group night and I really think that by age four all the kids in America ought to know about our Lord and Savior's violent, prolonged death and terrifying rise from the grave."

I talked to a friendly, intelligent gentleman a few days ago who literally thought Common Core meant kids had to wear dashikis to school while barking prayers to Allah at the loving moon and fingering each other. When I pointed out that all it actually is is a set of national standards, the dude looked straight-up shocked.

"Well... I've heard differently!"

"Sorry brother, that's not what you've heard, it's what you've been sold. Did you happen to hear any of this crazy dashiki-wearing poo poo from, oh, say, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, or Bill O'Reilly?"

"You know, come to think of it..."