One state’s ‘brilliant’ fix to stopping students from opting out of Common Core

One state’s ‘brilliant’ fix to stopping students from opting out of Common Core

It’s one of the oldest tricks in business. Your product or service isn’t selling, so you change the name. How effective is this strategy? Just ask the creators of the search engine BackRub. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because its creators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, changed the name of their company in 1996 to Google.

Perhaps mindful of the power of rebranding and understandably vexed over that staggering 20% of students in New York who opted out of Common Core testing this year, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch thinks the answer to “selling” the much-maligned national standards is to change their name.

Tisch said the state is considering something like the Empire State Standards.

Via Democrat & Chronicle:

Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said Tuesday that the state is “toying with” a possible name change for a revamped Common Core, the set of more-stringent education standards that has sparked often-contentious debate in school districts across New York.

In an interview with public radio’s “The Capitol Pressroom,” Tisch said the name of the standards is among the things being discussed by the state Education Department as it reviews the Common Core under new Commissioner MaryEllen Elia.

Tisch insists that renaming Common Core wouldn’t be the sole change to the disastrous standardized testing program, but citing other states, later hinted that other changes would merely be “tweaks” and that the program would remain largely intact.

“Other states have reviewed these Common Core standards, and here is more or less what’s happened: They have tweaked in a couple of areas, but they haven’t changed them,” she said. “What they did do, however, is they changed the name of them.”

Tisch blamed “politicization” for Common Core’s bad rap and offered a couple of name suggestions that would surely trick parents into embracing the program.

If you call them something different and you make appropriate adjustments addressing some developmental questions, I think those are all appropriate things to do.

But a pig is going to smell bad regardless of what you call it. Glyn Wright, executive director of the Eagle Forum, recently told Fox News, “Even under a different name, the Common Core Standards are still mediocre, at best, and continue to put American students at a significant disadvantage to their international peers.”

He added, “Rebranding the Common Core does not change the fact that it is still a top-down, federally controlled approach to education.”

“We know that Americans will not be fooled by dressing-up this failed initiative.”

Cross-posted at the Mental Recession

Rusty Weiss

Rusty Weiss

Rusty Weiss is editor of the Mental Recession, one of the top conservative blogs of 2012. His writings have appeared at the Daily Caller, American Thinker, FoxNews.com, Big Government, the Times Union, and the Troy Record.

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