MARKETING PRO: Common Core propaganda fails: Well-financed education “reformers” fight common sense

[yurbud]

If Democrats were really worried about losing the midterms, they might consider doing a 180 on feeding our kids to the wolves on Wall Street.

In addition to eroding our kids public education, DC Democrats have put the knife in the back of one of their largest and most consistent constituencies, teachers.

Tell all the hedge fund managers to keep their campaign donations and grants to schools that come with strings that turn into nooses and instead make those sociopaths pay more taxes and use the money to improve public schools to model the best of real private schools and past public schools before we started letting Wall Street and dilitante billionaires looking for a new public asset to plunder dictate education policy.

Jeff Bryant
Salon

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.”

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