Seriously, CAP?

So there I am, passing some quick minutes on twitter, when this appears.

Every child deserves a high-quality education: Let’s stop politicizing the #CommonCore pic.twitter.com/Cfr1V5Ddyk

— CAP Education (@EdProgress) August 10, 2015

I checked quickly to see if it was a retweet from 2013. But no. It's the Center for American Progress, trying to sell something that I don't think anybody, anywhere, is buying any more.

First of all, calling to stop politicizing Common Core is like demanding that we stop making water wet. Common Core was born in politics, sold to politicians, and pushed into the world using strictly political means and methods. It was not created by educators, and it was not pitched to educators. Instead the creators of CCSS, a group of politically-connected members of the educational-industrial complex, went straight over the heads of educators and started in finding ways to start pushing the Core. The feds helped promote it. Bill Gates became its sponsor (because, again, the fathers of Common Core did not say, "Let's see what actual teachers think about this" but instead said, "Let's go get a really rich, powerful person to become our patrons and push the crap out of this.") If you want to read about it all in painstaking detail, try Mercedes Schneider's book :



Bottom line-- you cannot "politicize" Common Core any more than you can make salt salty. And that's before we get to your real problem, which is that folks are not so much politicizing Common Core as just ignoring it as the meaningless amateur hash it is. Yes, plenty of damage is still being done in its name, but CCSS as it was originally conceived and created is pretty much dead.

Furthermore, nobody "knows" that higher standards will prepare our students for future success because A) "higher standards is a meaningless phrase and B) there isn't an iota of evidence that high standards have any effect on future success (whatever that means, exactly-- higher standards will insure you have a more compatible spouse and more attractive children? that you will be happier than low-standards people?)

This is baloney-- and stale baloney at that. And, it should be noted, being served up by a group with close ties to candidate Hillary Clinton.

Hard to believe that anybody is still pushing this ridiculous poop sandwich this late in the game. CAP, if you are going to continue to pipe up about education, at least say things that aren't so obviously foolish.