‘Simple’ can be important, because complexity is difficult to manage. Particularly in a world where no one person can know enough to make an informed decision. It helps get things done. Just sometimes at the expense of the general and the accurate.

Every student does not enter Kindergarten with the same preparation and skill set. Likewise, every student does not promote to the next grade level maintaining the same knowledge and skill set. So how can we expect that Process A will work for EVERY student?

Even Dan’s WCYDWT types of problems or 3-Act Lesson Model isn’t a panacea, nor have I ever read/heard him claim as such. But Dan’s argument with these problems is that given the rules of the game that we have to work with, these problems help reach more students to develop an excitement and intuition about mathematics that the current Factory Model FAILS to achieve.

@Eric – Common Core standards are not in themselves bad or useless. Instead, they seem to offer a better logical road map than my state’s current state standards. The problem of such standards will be to measure teacher performance (or school performance) based upon how their students measure up to them rather than measure the individual progress that student has made since being in said teachers classroom. But that is a whole other can of worms.

The “simple” solutions I see the most lump together all students, teachers, or schools, without any realization of just how disparate the members of those groups are. The problems we still have tend to be ones that require digging deeper, and the solutions will need to be multifaceted and nuanced.

Many people seem to act as though admitting that a problem is hard is a sign of weakness, when it’s more likely a sign of professionalism and intelligence.