You may not have intended it, but the complaints that the educators are dismissing from parents are identical to the one that I made. And have the same real cause.

Furthermore there is nothing new about this pattern. I grew up knowing about the new math disaster, and now I'm watching it repeat.

Here is the basic outline of how these reforms go.

1. Reformers have wonderful ideas about how children can learn better, understand more, etc.

2. On a small scale, done by motivated and knowledgable people, it works well. (Easily true through some combination of true enthusiasm, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect and random chance.)

3. Reformers try to get the good word out and get enthusiastic support from frustrated parents, interested educators, textbook manufacturers, and so on. Who have good ideas, refine the proposal, and begin the difficult work of getting support for the proposal and materials ready. (This was probably an accident the first few times, but it is unimaginable by now that the education industry isn't now actively aiming to be on the leading edge of these waves.)

4. The reforms hit the big time! Politicians line up, new standards are adopted, new curricula is rolled out, teachers are retrained, new textbooks. Billions of dollars gets spent here. (This step is very, very profitable for the education industry.)

5. There are glitches in the rollouts. Problems can be blamed on poor training of teachers, incomplete adoption of reforms, parents resistant to change, and so on. Reformers can dismiss all of this as not their fault, things are getting better and problems will be solved once everyone is on board. (At the time this can be dismissed as teething pains. But it is predictably inevitable given how much gets changed at once.)

6. Complaints get louder. Politicians are listening. Schools are fully on board with the reform, but parents push back. The vast majority of complaints continue to be dismissed by reformers as the result of improperly trained teachers, ignorant parents, and so on. Teachers publicly toe the party line, but many are privately unhappy. (This is about where Common Core is now.)

7. Unhappiness coalesces into support for NEW reforms. The reform has now become the OLD reform. Reformers remain convinced that they can fix the world, but they are now facing political headwinds and are losing ground. (Want to bet on whether this will happen soon.)

8. A new reform wins, hitting its step #4. The old reform is officially toast. However it will hang on for a long time in pockets and corners. And ideas from the old reform enter the educational gestalt as potentially parts of seeds for a new reform.

I knew about this cycle growing up. My mother was a teacher and had to deal with it for her whole life. She eventually quit when "whole language teaching" came in and she was going to be forced to give up phonics. (Never mind that her students reliably finished grade 1 reading at a grade 3 level. In our schools ideology trumps results.) I understand that you are hearing about this from educators who are part of the usual reform pattern. What you are hearing from those educators echos things that have been said in many prior movements, and will be said in many future ones.

Take, for instance, your statement that, "And it would be great if part of the support we gave to teachers was paying people like you to provide training to them, and helping those teachers who don't like teaching math learn what challenging and achievable standards actually are." That's not new. It is a common way to get people to try to become part of the reformers solution.

My answer to that is no. I know this pattern. I know how it turns out. The problem is generally not any individual reform. It is in how we DO reforms in this country. It reliably creates profits at the cost of serving our children poorly. That is evil by any definition that I care about, and I do not wish to support evil by becoming part of it.