American educational culture is obsessed with the idea of academic rigor. It shows up on marketing materials, core value statements, and school comparison charts. Rigor has become the gold standard of education, separating the wheat from the chaff and the excellent from the mediocre. Public schools, private schools, classical schools, progressive schools–they all claim academic rigor as a distinctive, leading to a market overrun with near-identical tag lines. The irony, of course, is that when competitors lay claim to the exact same distinguishing factor, the supposed distinctive ceases to function as such. In the case of many schools today, the
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