Neither Funny Nor Informative, This Core Strategy Should Die

When the Common Core debate was exploding three or four years ago, a primary pro-Core strategy seemed to be ignoring substantive objections to the Core and dismissing opponents as ignorant, maybe even loony. Over time, that strategy appeared to energize and expand opposition, and many Core supporters shelved it. But not, it seems, the Center for American Progress, which just posted to the website Funny or Die a video mocking Core-concerned parents.

You can watch the vid here, but basically two parents are sending their daughter to kindergarten and letting her know that she’ll have no need for books but will need a disguise, an ever-so-hilarious tin foil hat, and a ray gun, among other things, because her school uses Common Core and that means no to book-larnin', yes to “Pod People” mind-reading. Thankfully, before the little girl sets off, her older sister, about to start her first year of college, walks by the little girl’s room and sets her goofball parents straight. “Common Core is just some standards my teachers use,” she exasperatedly explains. “So, you know, we can get into college, and get a job, and hopefully move out of our crazy parent's house.”

Oh, is that it?

Not only insulting to Core opponents and dismissive of their concerns, the video is highly misleading. The Core is a specific set of standards – not just “some” standards – and states make teachers use them, quite likely in response to federal coercion. There is also no meaningful evidence that the Core enables students to get a job and leave the house of either their crazy or their sane parents. And a student entering college this year would have had little Core-aligned education – they would not have gone through it many years ago, as the video implies – because classroom implementation only began in the last two or three years.

Now, some opponents certainly ascribe things to the Core they should not. Sometimes these are politicians or education analysts, but often they are regular people with normal lives who cannot spend hours combing through laws and regulations to get all the right information. But CAP and many other Core defenders do, or at least should, know the whole truth, yet like this video they often put out misleading or woefully incomplete information, often with the stated goal of setting opponents straight. Indeed, just last week I responded to such “fact-checking” on the website of The Seventy Four. And what, by the way, did folks at The Seventy Four say about CAP’s video? They called it “hilarious” and reprinted a bunch of their flawed fact-check.

You can judge for yourself, of course, whether the video is hilarious. But there is little funny about dismissing the concerns of real parents and citizens who have had Common Core imposed on them, nor is it chuckle-inducing when, in the name of correcting others, Core fans keep distorting reality.