What Presidential Candidates Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce
The Presidential campaign is proving that Common Core is an issue that is not going to go away. Every candidate, in all political parties, is going to be asked, at some point, where they stand on Common Core. They should know that at least one segment of the public will then do all sorts of investigating of their own to vet their responses. Woe to those who try to cloak their true position with double speak, platitudes or outright lies.
The candidates will hopefully give their reasons for objecting to Common Core, but somewhere in this process it should be put down for the historical record why Americans are opposing the Common Core standards. We know there is a prohibition against national standards in the General Education Protection Act. We know that previous congresses failed to pass national standards even for one subject (history 1993 99:1 fail in the Senate). What we don’t have is a good record of is why these concepts have not met with broad public approval before. This would be a good sign post for the next time someone or some group tries to push for a single set of national standards.
If you ask a cross section of Americans their reasons for opposing Common Core, you will get a variety of answers. For some it’s the quality. For others it’s the one size fits all approach. For others it’s the associated testing or data collection. Still others object to the re-purposing of education in general or the businessification of the local school house. The reasons don’t fit neatly into a single political framework so folks are finding themselves in bed with very strange bedfellows for the first time when it comes to opposing Common Core. These differences make it very difficult for candidates to state their opposition to Common Core in a way that can gather broad support.
That education is being turned wholesale into a business that requires quarterly statistics, economies of scale and worker accountability is clear. That it is being redirected towards workforce planning is also clear. Given that new focus, and the business support for the standards that is nudging candidates away from rejecting them outright, it is hard to understand why better business principles were not applied to the development of Common Core. Though the ELA CCSSI Work Group had a marketing expert on it, she was not able to see the problem with Common Core standards in the first place. Any marketing of the standards, and there was a ton, ended up being grossly misdirected at trying to presell the education delivery system on their worth, as defined by the base that was pushing them. The problem was that base was not the ones who would end up using them day to day. There was a serious disconnect from the very beginning.
Policy experts should perhaps have approached psychophycisit Howard Moskowitz when they were in the planning phases of Common Core. They might have noticed this glaring marketing flaw from the beginning and saved us all a lot of time.
Moskowitz’s work was ground breaking and changed the world of spaghettis sauce (and mustard and pickles) forever. You can listen here to Malcom Gladwell talk about Moskowitz’s work for the makers of Prego spaghetti sauce.
The short version of the story is that the spaghetti sauce industry had a model sauce that was thin and watery with various spices, based on a sauce made in Italy. What they had might have been authentic Italian, but it had limited appeal. The manufacturer wanted to expand their market and hired Moskowitz to tell them which way to go. But instead of assuming that people liked their sauce this way and only tweaking it with different spices, Moskowitz decided to try all kinds of sauce differences including some that no one had ever thought of before, like sauces that were chunky. In taste tests it turned out that people liked chunky sauce, even though they didn’t know that when they first got on the What Presidential Candidates Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce » Missouri Education Watchdog:
