Try PISA Tuesday instead of Cyber Monday and Have Spaghetti Tuesday on Wednesday

"Black Friday" gave way to "Cyber Monday" (today!) and Cyber Monday, in turn, will give way to PISA Tuesday!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/01/how-public-opinion-about-new-pisa-tes...

The PISA results (Program for International Student Assessment) will be released Tuesday morning. These are the test results qua results -- the World Cup of testing! -- and always now a great source for media and marketing spin.


America is failing we will be told because this belief opens up markets for a ready to burst "education tech bubble"http://www.geekwire.com/2012/coming-tech-bubble-education/ and satisfies the anti-teacher and anti-union cravings of the political right.

On the left (or what is at least a placeholder for the left), the Obama administration and Arne "those darn white women" Duncan will be looking, too, to sell -- in their case, another failed "national" effort called "Race to the Top." The only way they can convince voters that they have done anything for education is to foreground their Common Core work . . . and the Common Core depends on the notion that public education is failing across the board.

For Obama and Duncan, then, success is not an option because we have bought the magic of the Common Core and it must succeed...it is already in the website.

Sunday's papers and today's are filled with Common Core editorials, timed to sell that curriculum as a national savior. Here is the fluff story from The Detroit News educational "fluffer" Jennifer Chambers:http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20131202/SCHOOLS/312020014/As-state-shifts-Common-Core-students-d...

You see, the Tuesday "release" isn't a release at all in the sense that no one has seen this round of test results. Plenty have seen them. Arne Duncan, for example, has had them for weeks and has been given time to spin like crazy.

PISA Tuesday, in that sense, is as choreographed as Black Friday and Cyber Monday -- all with an aim to sell.

The only thing we know we won't hear in the crazy spins to come are  the "F" word -- Finland -- in that the top PISA scoring country honors and funds teachers and give them considerable autonomy; we also know we won't hear the word "poverty" because America has more children in poverty that other competing nations.

To truly race to the (PISA) top we would have to race towards Finland and away from poverty and that just doesn't sell.

Here is Richard Rothstein explicating the weirdness of pre 1990s "America is Failing in Education" trying to keep the sales pitch rolling:

"Advocates participating in Tuesday’s staged PISA Day release include several who, a quarter century ago, warned that America’s inadequate education system and workforce skills imperiled our competitiveness and future. Their warnings were followed by a substantial acceleration of American productivity growth in the mid-1990s, and by an American economy whose growth rate surpassed the growth rates of countries that were alleged to have better prepared and more highly skilled workers.

Today, threats to the nation’s future prosperity come much less from flaws in our education system than from insufficiently stimulative fiscal policies which tolerate excessive unemployment, wasting much of the education our young people have acquired; an outdated infrastructure: regulatory and tax policies that reward speculation more than productivity; an over-extended military; declining public investment in research and innovation; a wasteful and inefficient health care system; and the fact that typical workers and their families, no matter how well educated, do not share in the fruits of productivity growth as they once did. The best education system we can imagine can’t succeed if we ignore these other problems."