A new video posted on the humor website Funny Or Die by the liberal Center for American Progress mocks Common Core’s opponents as nutty conspiracy-theorists.
The video opens with a daughter preparing for her first day of kindergarten. “Since you’re starting school, you are starting a new program called Common Core,” the child’s mother says. “That means you won’t be needing these anymore,” she says as she dumps children’s books in a trash bag. The parents tell their daughter she’ll spend all day taking standardized tests, give her a disguise and put a tinfoil hat on her head to prevent “the Common Core pod people from reading your mind.” They even give her goggles so a microchip can’t be put in her eye.
Then the family’s other daughter enters the room, about to leave for her first day of college, to take classes on calculus, literature and art history. “Common Core is just some standards my teachers use so, you know, we can get into college and get a job and hopefully move out of our crazy parents’ house,” the older daugher says.
The video features Kate Flannery, famous for her role as Meredith on “The Office,” and Brian Huskey, famous for his roles in various comedy movies and shows, including “Veep.”
It’s an entertaining video, but obviously it exaggerates how opponents of Common Core feel. Rather than trying to ease opponents’ concerns and bring them to the other side, it laughs at them and thus will likely only harden their opposition to Common Core.
The video makes it seem as if there are no legitimate concerns with Common Core, and that may backfire on Common Core fans. A 2015 poll from Education Next showed only 37 percent of parents favor Common Core, with 46 percent opposed. Even worse for those fans, it mocks the 43 percent of teachers who oppose Common Core. Those numbers change slightly depending on how Common Core is described. But it remains true that millions of Americans don’t support Common Core.
Instead of taking the best arguments against Common Core and showing why they’re wrong,the ad simply portrays opponents as unhinged. It’s worth a few chuckles, but in terms of political dialogue, it’s shallow. It’s the type of shallowness we’ve come to expect during this election cycle.
There are legitimate arguments against what’s included in the Common Core education standards. For example, the standards shift students away from reading fiction books and toward nonfiction texts. There are also several ways the math standards get a little too specific, blurring the line between providing students with the tools necessary to learn how to do math and telling them that there’s only one right way to do the work.
The standards were also pushed onto states using federal money, via Race to the Top grants, and waivers from No Child Left Behind’s penalties that were conditional on Common Core adoption.
Had the video addressed these concerns, it would have been more effective. For example, rather than portraying Common Core’s opponents as crazy, it could have explained why students will be better prepared for college if they read more nonfiction and less fiction. But perhaps that wouldn’t have been as entertaining for Common Core’s fans.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
