Brand confusion
Common Core continues to jumble up the normal brands and teams of USA STRONG "politics".
Normally NEA and the D brand are exactly congruent. NEA supports everything with the D brand and opposes everything with the R brand.
This normal behavior showed beautifully with No Child Left Behind, which was PURELY TEDDY KENNEDY'S IDEA. But NCLB was implemented by a Bush, which made it an R-brand product. So NEA ferociously opposed Teddy's idea.
Common Core is breaking up the congruence. Because Common Core requires
teachers to be evaluated, it is so wildly grotesquely evil that NEA has to officially oppose it even though it's purely and totally D-brand. No Repooflicans were involved in making or branding Common Core.
From EdWeek:
[At this year's NEA convention] at least one item of significant note did pass. That initiative marks the union's strongest statement so far against the tests designed to measure common-core skills crafted by the Smarter Balanced group and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC. It directs the union to campaign to end those tests as long as they're used for teacher evaluation and school ratings.
On the Repoof "side", branding is also confused. Jeb is supporting Common Cause, which takes some actual guts. His explanations show that Jeb understands something about education, which makes him unusual and just a bit admirable among politicians on "all" "sides".
Plain and simple fact: Common Core is GOOD for BOTH teachers and kids. If allowed to run, it will pull American schools STRONGLY in the correct direction toward job-based and project-based learning.
All other R-brand "candidates" are ferociously opposing CC for the normal brand reasons, plus the normal fucking idiotic Repoof hatred for
conservative job-based learning.
Labels: Experiential education