Common Core Not Doing Its Job. Too Bad for You, America

Naturally, I'm as shocked as anyone to hear the NAEP scores are not skyrocketing. Reading scores are stagnant and math scores are actually going down. Who would've thunk it? After all, we've made kids do close reading. What could be better for a student than reading and analyzing the Gettysburg Address with absolutely no context? It's about time we got rid of those ridiculous methods that insist we actually understand what we read.

And now we can stop wasting time reading novels. Finally we can take excerpts from them and analyze them until the end of time. What's more valuable than that? Or we can take a short story and analyze it for 17 days. What motivates students more than that? I, for one, am sick of all this "loving literature" and "loving to read" nonsense, and it's about time we let kids know that reading only exists so that we can answer questions about it on tests.

Along with that, of course, is the new visionary approach to math. I mean, finally we're doing away with simple equations and making things more creative. I mean, why make math simple when you can make it complicated. There's nothing people like more than solving problems in ways that are more complicated than necessary, and using common core math will surely make people love math as much as it makes them love reading, which is to say, not at all. That's what we call "rigor."

And the point of "rigor," of course, is to develop "grit." Once you have "grit," you can accomplish the most tedious and pointless tasks in the most inefficient fashion, and still get up and say, "Thank you sir, may I have another?" After all, children are work product for our highly respected corporations, and someone's got to do this kind of work. Our friends over at the Walmart family contribute big money to refominess, and of course people trained like this might not run screaming to jump out of tall buildings after lives as Walmart associates. That's good for Walmart, as the alternative might be to pay a living wage or something.

Fortunately, we have Common Core champions, like Hillary Clinton, who will make sure our children continue to be trained in these things. The fact that they don't actually benefit anyone is neither here nor there. Hey, it must be OK because even AFT President Randi Weingarten supports it. And if that's not enough, UFT President Michael Mulgrew will punch your face and push it in the dirt if you don't.

The fact that none of this actually helps our children understand anything better is neither here nor there. Bill Gates spent a bazillion dollars funding this stuff, and that ought to be good enough for anyone. So shut up and sit down, America.